On March 7, 1965, police in Selma, Alabama, brutally assaulted hundreds of civil rights marchers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Nearly a half-century after this iconic moment in the black freedom struggle, the story of “Bloody Sunday” remains familiar to millions of Americans. Scenes such as this were not unique to Selma or the South, however. In fact, just two years after the attack in Alabama, a similar melee broke out near the Sixteenth Street Viaduct in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, in an episode that almost nobody remembers today, Father James Groppi, a white Catholic priest, led two hundred activists in a daring foray across the residential color line to protest housing discrimination in the virtually all-white South Side. After a violent clash initiated by local whites, the marchers retreated across the viaduct, dazed yet unbowed by the massive resistance they had encountered. In The Selma of the North, Patrick Jones recovers this and other forgotten stories from Milwaukee's civil rights movement while urging scholars to devote more attention to black freedom struggles in the North.

Jones focuses on the years between 1958 and 1970, when a militant movement for racial justice exploded in Milwaukee. Prior to World War II, black Milwaukeeans suffered from severe discrimination in housing, education, and employment. It was not until the late 1950s, however, when the African American community had grown large enough to challenge the liberal and socialist power structures that held sway at city hall. The initial spark for the insurgency arrived in 1958, when white patrolmen killed a black man named Daniel Bell in what many viewed as an act of police brutality. By the 1960s, the battle over civil rights had broadened to include contests over school segregation, racial exclusion at the Eagles Club and other all-white organizations, and systematic housing discrimination that kept most blacks trapped in the city's dilapidated “inner core.” During these campaigns, Groppi and a cohort of activists from the NAACP Youth Council and the “Commandos,” a militant spinoff group, sought to produce “creative tension” in order to dramatize racial inequities. Defying entrenched stereotypes about African American radicalism, Groppi and his colleagues built a distinctive black power movement marked by its close connection to the Catholic Church, its embrace of interracialism, and its commitment to a brand of self-defense known as “not-violence.” By decade's end, activists had won several important victories in their quest for better schools, jobs, and fair housing. Yet by the time the movement waned in the early 1970s, “white flight” and deindustrialization had left the central city in a severely weakened state.

Students, scholars, and others interested in new approaches to civil rights history will want to consult this impressively researched and persuasively argued book. For among other things, Jones demonstrates that segregation and white violence were as ubiquitous and organic in Milwaukee as they were in the Deep South. Moreover, Jones makes a strong case that the civil rights and black power movements in Milwaukee were deeply rooted in municipal politics. As well, the author shows that Milwaukee's direct action movement took root before Bloody Sunday in Selma and other momentous events in the South. This chronology is important because scholars have often unfairly reduced northern struggles over civil rights to mere analogs of the southern movement.

Jones's story reinforces and extends many of the findings of Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North and other recently published books on the northern civil rights movement without charting much new ground analytically. Still, The Selma of the North will persuade even the most skeptical readers that the movement in Milwaukee was sui generis. Unfortunately, though, Jones's work suffers from several shortcomings. To cite the most obvious of them, the author draws numerous comparisons between the radically different places of Milwaukee and Selma as a means to underscore the depth of northern racism. In fact, the Alabama city even receives top billing in the book's title. While readers unfamiliar with the slew of monographs that assail structural racism in the North may appreciate such rhetorical flourishes, the regional comparisons—even those made by the historical actors themselves—actually undermine one of Jones's central claims: namely, that civil rights struggles in the North deserve to be understood on their own terms and not always in reference to those that occurred in the South. Likewise, the overwrought Milwaukee-Selma analogies often result in a one-sided and all-too-predictable portrait of white racial politics in the city. While Jones pays a great deal of attention to working-class white extremists, racial moderates in the city and suburbs—who also resisted most forms of desegregation—receive very little attention. Despite these and other weaknesses, The Selma of the North is an engaging book that specialists and general readers alike will profit from reading.