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JOHN WANAMAKER: Welcome to MPR News Presents. I'm John Wanamaker. As we come to the end of Women's History Month, this hour, you'll hear about a Minnesota woman, who was a long-time activist for civil rights but has mostly been forgotten. New York University historian, Thomas Sugrue, has written a book exploring the stories of Northern activists who challenged racial inequality.

It's titled Sweet Land of Liberty, The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Prominently featured in this book is Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who grew up in Anoka and was the first African-American to attend Hamlin. She worked for social justice for many decades, and was the only woman on the organizing committee for the 1963 march on Washington.

Thomas Sugrue spoke last weekend at the Minnesota Historical Society's history forum to a sold-out audience that had never heard of that trailblazing Anoka woman.

THOMAS SUGRUE: A little more than 50 years ago, the great Black novelist, James Baldwin, offered this reflection, history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways.

And history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. Baldwin's essay is, in some ways, the perfect summary of why I am a historian, but it also is a reminder for us to grapple with the histories forgotten and remembered, partially obscured, buried away, that continue to shape, as Baldwin put it, our frames of references, our identities, our aspirations.

My interest in the history of civil rights in the North grows out of my own engagement with the present, and the ways in which we frame our political, our legal, and our cultural understandings of race based on our reading, or often, our misreading or forgetting of the past. As I embarked on writing my book, Sweet Land of Liberty, subtitled, The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, I began to grapple, both as a writer and, indeed, as a teacher, with the ways that we tell the history of the civil rights struggle in the United States.

It's a history that we commemorate in a series of anniversaries, the anniversary of the monumental Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954, or the murder of Chicago native, Emmett Till, when he returned to Mississippi as a 15-year-old child, or the anniversary of the attacks on students desegregating schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, or the anniversary of the landmark civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, or this year, the 50th anniversary of the Federal Fair Housing Law of 1968.

We grapple with these issues when we look back at the various anniversaries. The anniversary, for example, of the long, hot summers of the 1960s that led to riots in more than 160 small towns, suburbs, and major cities throughout the United States, or coming up in just a few weeks, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. My very list of events suggests how much has changed over the last half century.

Official Southern-style Jim Crow racial segregation is a thing of the past, and we have seen real progress from the expansion of the African-American middle class, to Black students enrolled in numbers unimaginable 50 years ago in leading colleges and universities, to the dramatic expansion of the number of African-American elected officials, to the reduction in rates of poverty among African-Americans. We are, in other words, no longer the America of Brown versus Board of Education or the America that necessitated the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Some, in fact, argue, especially in the light of the election of Barack Obama as our first African-American president, that we have decisively entered a new era in civil rights in the United States. Some have even gone so far as to call it a postracial age, although the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent struggles over policing and education perhaps give the lie to that.

We have overcome, or have we? The history of the struggle for racial equality in the North offers us clues, important clues, into what is very much the unfinished struggle for racial equality in the United States. It's in the North that we can see some of the most extraordinary activists, leaders, grassroots participants in an amazing social movement, whose history has only partially been told, but where we can also see, in high relief, some of the gains, but also some of the terrible failures or incomplete victories of the Civil Rights struggle.

But by and large, the history of the North is not the history with which most of us are familiar. There is a voluminous scholarship on the history of civil rights in the South. It's a history that makes its way onto the silver screen in extraordinary films, all the way up to Anna DuVernay's recent film, Selma, on the extraordinary events that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

But I would argue that focusing primarily or exclusively on the South comes at a very high cost to understanding our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. If the vast majority of the near library of books and articles on the history of civil rights focuses on the South, we overlook the ways in which the question of racial injustice and racial inequality is a national problem, not just a regional problem.

We write off ways in which the history of the African-American freedom struggle needs to be understood as constitutive to all of American history, not just a regional peculiarity of the system of slavery in the South. The commonplace histories of civil rights usually begin around 1954 or 1955, with Brown versus Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott.

Sometimes, especially in the recent textbooks that our kids might be reading in school, there's a little bit of a nod to what happened beforehand, but usually, not very much. Those histories of the African-American civil rights struggle follow a very compelling storyline, usually through the life of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the organizations with which he was most closely associated, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he founded, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Those histories culminate in the abolition of de jure Jim Crow in the South, and the passage of the Landmark Civil Rights Legislation of the mid-1960s. We tell the story of King and the Southern freedom struggle again and again and again, for all sorts of reasons. It's a story that has a very clear beginning, a middle, and an end.

It's a story that is, at heart, a morality tale. It is, in fundamental respects, a very Christian story, a story of sin, of suffering, of martyrdom, and of redemption. In the story of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., America is wiped clean of its original sin of racial injustice and slavery, and is redeemed to move to a new era of equality for all.

Like all morality tales, the history of the African-American freedom struggle in the United States hinges on a number of binary oppositions, binary oppositions that ultimately obscure more than they reveal. Nonviolence versus violence, de jure, or segregation required by law, and de facto, segregation that supposedly just happened as a result of individual preferences and choices.

Color blindness, the ideal to which Americans supposedly aspire, versus color consciousness, an identity politics that emerged in the wake, it said, of the tumultuous movements of the 1960s. Or in another version, integration, creating a single common American culture and society versus separation, people moving into separate groups that reflect their own identities, their own cultures, their own histories, and their own interests, and celebrating that separation.

Or, as we sometimes put it in shorthand, Martin, that is Martin Luther King Jr., versus Malcolm. That is, one, the avatar of Gandhian nonviolence, civility, and the changing of hearts and minds, the other, the advocate of racial separation and division, someone who called for independence and freedom and self-determination of African-Americans and the creation of separate Black institutions.

The conventional story often hinges around the most important of those binaries, North versus South. South, a place of primeval evil, North, a place of racial innocence. The conventional story that we tell, this morality story, generally has two endings, the happy one, that the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s profoundly altered race relations in the United States. And perhaps, in the most optimistic view, by eliminating the formal legal barriers to racial equality, left it to African-Americans themselves to determine their own fates.

Any remaining racial inequality, this argument goes, in the United States, and a very influential argument, mostly coming from the political right, any remaining racial inequality in the United States comes from individual moral or behavioral deficiencies, family breakdown, substance abuse, laziness. We've removed the formal barriers, the argument goes. Opportunity is there, waiting for those who take it.

The other more tragic ending sees the North as the tragic denouement of the African-American freedom struggle. The movement, it is said, and that's usually Martin Luther King Jr., went North. And when it did, it crashed apart on the shoals of Black power and the urban riots. What's in Detroit, Newark, Chicago?

In this explanation, the African-American freedom struggle, then, is a triumphant story until the forces of separation and division create a poisonous identity politics that crashes the dreams of racial justice, of integration, and equality. As we look out onto the ways that we tell the history of civil rights in the United States, we have to ask ourselves a number of questions. Why do we find this one particular, really important, but particular version of civil rights in the United States to be the compelling one, the one that we tell and retell?

Why is it, for example, that the vast majority of Americans in the United States today identify with, among other people, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who today, is the single most recognized figure in all of American history? Students in high school, polled over a series of years, recognized King more than they recognize George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt.

But why is it that we focus on King and one facet of King's life, rather than focusing more broadly on an extraordinary movement that spanned sea to shining sea, North to South? Indeed, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. himself, again and again, in sermons, in writings, in letters, from the beginning of his career, emphasized that this was not just a Southern problem, that this was a national and, indeed, even international problem.

The Reverend King himself has been flattened in our tellings of the history of Civil Rights to a single dimension, King as moderate, King as voice of conciliation, rather than us grappling even with the more radical challenges that any, even superficial, reading of his sermons, speeches, and writings would lead us to do. So what I want to do, to put a point on it, is to make an argument that the story of racial inequality in the North and the struggles against it, beginning much further back than the 1950s, greatly complicates our understanding of America's ongoing racial crises.

Let me put another point on it. Places like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Minneapolis and Saint Paul are just as important in understanding the African-American freedom struggle in the United States as Birmingham and Montgomery and Greensboro. Small towns like Selma need to be paired with small towns in the North, like Englewood, New Jersey. Who would think? But it's actually an enormously important place in the African-American freedom struggle. I could go on.

In other words, to fully understand the history of race, the struggle against racial inequality and the opportunities, the successes, the partial victories, and the failures of the African-American freedom struggle in the United States requires us to think really widely. With that in mind, that kind of big picture in mind, I'm going to zoom down to a small picture for a few minutes to illustrate some of these themes, and then I'm going to step back up again and make some large generalizations about the history of civil rights in the North.

In Sweet Land of Liberty, in my book, I try to excavate the mostly forgotten histories of any number of important but hardly known activists in the African-American freedom struggle in the North. Many of them are women, because the history of the African-American freedom struggle has disproportionately focused on male charismatic leaders, who are important, but by no means monopolized the African-American freedom struggle.

I discovered all sorts of interesting people along the way, Roxanne Jones, a Philadelphia welfare mother who led the struggle to improve conditions for the city's poor. Or another fascinating figure, Paul Zuber, an African-American attorney, who combined the tactics of integration and Black Power in his litigation efforts to try to integrate public schools in Harlem, in Englewood, New Jersey, which I mentioned before, and in Chicago.

These are not household names. Most of you have probably never heard of them. And another, who I'll talk about for the next few minutes, is arguably one of the handful of most important people in the African-American freedom struggle in the 20th century, someone whose career touched nearly every dimension of the Civil Rights movement, but who is now, except for in a few small circles, mostly completely unknown.

Her story is a story that spans almost the entire North.

She's a figure who moves from her home state of Minnesota, to Ohio, to New Jersey, and to New York, and ends up in a remarkable moment 55 years ago this summer, on the stage at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC, with Martin Luther King Jr. There were very few women on the March on Washington organizing committee or on the platform. In fact, she was the only woman in the leadership of the March on Washington and one of the few women on the stage, along with Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates, who only got token acknowledgment at that march.

Her name was Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Anna Arnold Hedgeman had a remarkable career. When she stood on the stage with the Reverend King and with other civil rights activists in Washington, she was 64. She was a native Minnesotan. Well, not quite native. She was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, but moved to Minnesota when she was just an infant with her parents.

Her parents ended up in a small town not too far from here, named Anoka. They were, at first, at least in the 1910 census, among the 15 African-Americans who lived in Anoka. By 1920, when Anna was in college, there were 41 African-Americans living in Anoka.

Anna Arnold or Anna Arnold Hedgeman, which was her married name, in many respects, embodies a trajectory of the Civil Rights struggle in the North that we need to understand to make sense out of modern American history. How did this woman from little Anoka, Minnesota, become the only woman on the planning committee for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963?

Her father was a minister, and they lived in a very small and tight knit African-American community. But the vast majority of engagements that the young Anna had as a child in Anoka were with whites because it was a white town. The Black population wasn't big enough to have separate schools by race. And she grew up comfortable in a largely white world.

Still, she had ambitions that far exceeded the opportunities that this little town in Minnesota would offer her. She was incredibly smart, and so she left Anoka and became the first African-American student to enroll in Hamline, here in St. Paul. A remarkable feat indeed for an African-American woman to be the pioneer in an all-white institution.

It should be said, Anna Hedgeman, or Anna Arnold, as she was known at the time, ended up being a pioneer in so many ways, as we shall see. St. Paul didn't have a very big African-American population. Indeed, Minnesota didn't have a very big African-American population at the time. But many of them lived in the Twin Cities, including a large and active population here in St. Paul.

Anna connected with them, including with some figures who would be important in the African-American freedom struggle later on, including the future head of the NAACP, Walter White. She was a really good student at Hamline, but she was a woman, and an African-American woman, even if she was a pioneer, graduating from nearly all white institution. But she was ambitious, and she decided to follow a career trajectory common for incredibly smart and ambitious women in the 1920s. She decided to become a schoolteacher.

Anna Hedgeman didn't recall having any really problematic experiences around her race in Anoka growing up, but she experienced her first serious incident of discrimination here in St. Paul as she graduated from Hamline. She applied to get a job teaching in St. Paul's public schools.

At that time, public school districts around the country, and St. Paul was not an exception to this, would not hire so-called colored teachers to preside over classrooms with white students. She couldn't get a job in St. Paul, so she decided to gain some teaching experience by moving South.

She moved to a little town called Hawley Springs, Mississippi, a pretty bleak place. Hawley Springs was home of Rust College, which was an institution that served African-Americans, both in high school and at the college level, and she taught there for two years. She hated Mississippi, and it was the only really sustained period of her life that she spent in the South.

But she was smart, and she was ambitious. And she decided after two years at Rust College that being a teacher was not really her calling. So she went to another profession that was open to ambitious and intelligent African-American women, social services. She ended up going to one of the most important African-American institutions, indeed one of the most important institutions in the United States in that period, the YWCA.

And she ended up working for the YWCA, first in Springfield, Ohio, where she arrived in 1923. Springfield, Ohio, was a real eye-opening experience for still-young Anna, launching her career. Like every town with Y's and an African-American population, there was the Negro or colored Y, YMCA and YWCA, as well as the main Y. They were separate and unequal.

That is, the White Y's were usually much better provisioned with better buildings, with better services, with a greater range of activities. But still, by the standards of the 1920s, the YWCA and YMCA movement was relatively progressive on questions of race. That meant in places like Springfield, Black and White women from their respective Y's getting together from time to time to discuss questions of race in the United States.

Anna Hedgeman didn't find these meetings to be very productive or useful. Most of the time, she ended up answering ill-informed questions by well-meaning White women in the Y, who would ask things like, don't you all just want to marry Whites? And isn't that a problem? Or, what does the Negro think about, and then dot, dot, dot, answer a question, as if she could be the spokesperson for her entire race.

Still, she was patient, and the Y created a little bit of a space for the opening of opportunities for African-Americans generally. It was there in Springfield, though, that she encountered a very bleak side of race and inequality in the North. Springfield had a Black population going back to the 19th century. Like many medium-sized Ohio towns, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

It had a very active abolition movement, and there weren't racially separate schools as there were in the South in the same period. But in 1921, as Springfield's African-American population grew, Whites began to violently challenge the movement of African-Americans in. In 1921, just a couple of years before Anna arrived there, there was a race riot in Springfield, a race riot consisting of Whites rampaging through the African-American section of town, attacking Blacks based on a rumor that a Black young man had attacked a White woman, a pretty familiar story.

In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan moved into power in Springfield, among other things, electing the president of the Springfield school board. And it should be said that while we think of the Klan as rednecks and not respectable, the Klan, in the 1920s, was a national organization that attracted some of the most prominent and respectable members of their respective communities, primarily Protestants, primarily middle-class businessmen, including those who took leadership in parts of Springfield's city government while she was there.

As one of its first acts, Springfield's school board made the decision to create the town's first separate, all-colored elementary school as a way of instituting racial segregation. And this, again, is a progressive city in a progressive state North of the Mason-Dixon line. Anna decided, while she was at the Y in Springfield, that she would attempt to integrate the Black and White Y's, opening up the doors of the White Y to African-American residents.

She was rebuffed. It would not be the first time. But smart, and ambitious, and recognized by the leadership of the colored Y as a promising figure, she got a new post just a couple of years later in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the African-American Y there. And her racial education, her radicalization, her movement into the center of civil rights politics continued.

In Jersey City, as in most places, the YWCA had its primary emphasis on the education and uplift of African-American women, particularly working-class African-American women, to give them an education in how to be polite in reading and writing, as a way of allowing them to become resectable African-American citizens. But in Jersey City, Anna discovered that most African-American women that she met were working in industrial laundries as laundresses, terrible, miserable work.

Most of the laundries were unheated. They were filled with steam. Hands got raw with the detergents and lies that were used. And she actually went undercover as a laundry worker to experience what many of the women who were her charges at the Y experienced.

Anna's experience as a laundress and working for laundry workers in Jersey City led her to begin to shift the emphasis in her politics more towards economic justice. She began, by the mid and late 1920s, to argue that we can't just change the minds and hearts or the respectability of African-American women. We need to deal with their living conditions, their working conditions.

And again, ambitious, and intelligent, and recognized for her leadership skills, she was recruited to Harlem, where she moved to the biggest Y in the United States and had a second-level position of leadership there, a remarkable achievement for a woman who was barely in her late 20s. Harlem was a truly a-ha moment for the young woman from Anoka, Minnesota.

It was there that her full-fledged politics emerged in various forms. Harlem was a remarkable place when she arrived there in the late 1920s. It was the center of African-American culture in the United States, in the midst of what was called the Harlem Renaissance, an extraordinary moment of cultural production, including music, art, photography, dance, and so forth, of course, jazz.

The Harlem Y was a real hub for the Harlem Renaissance. There, she heard speakers, like the African-American scholar and founder of the NAACP, W.E.B Du Bois. She listened to readings by poets, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. She heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers from other traditionally Black College in Nashville. Indeed, her future husband was an alum of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

She met Mary McLeod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell, two of the most prominent African-American women activists of the early 20th century. But there, in Harlem, she also encountered a range and diversity of African-American activism that was very different from her childhood. In Harlem, she met members of the United Negro Improvement Association, the followers of Marcus Garvey, who called for Black separatism and hoped that African-Americans would migrate back to Africa and establish a home there.

She worked very closely with one of the largest chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the United States, the leading civil rights organization in the country, reconnecting with Walter White, who she had met in Minnesota. She became increasingly close to one of the most important civil rights organizations in the country, the brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of African-American workers on the rail.

They were the folks who carried suitcases and served food to white passengers on trains when train travel was a luxury. And the sleeping Car Porters became one of the most important organizations in the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, led by the charismatic union activist and socialist, A. Philip Randolph, who would be one of the leaders of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

It was in Harlem, and then in Brooklyn, where she moved to direct the Brooklyn YWCA, that Anna Hedgeman also came into an alliance with a peculiar mixture of activists, distinctive of what was happening in the Civil Rights struggle in the North. She allied herself, as every good Y woman would, with members of the African-American church, particularly African-American churchwomen, who were the backbone of so much of the African-American freedom struggle.

But also, she Allied herself with members of New York's thriving Communist Party, the largest chapter in the United States, the center of a left-wing insurgency during the 1930s. Hedgeman herself was too much of a good Methodist to ever become a Communist, but she was someone who was very inspired by the role that Communist activists played in staffing and showing up at nearly every civil rights protest in the city in the 1930s and in the 1940s, protests against housing segregation, protests against discrimination in the workplace, protests against police brutality against African-Americans in the country's largest city.

During her period in New York, Anna embraced both the politics of the New Deal for a time she worked for the New Deal in administering some of its works programs in New York City, but joined some of the most vital protest movements in that city in the 1930s, most notably, The Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaign.

The Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Campaign was a movement that drew from a wide range of African-American activists, churchwomen, communists, socialists, labor organizers, New Deal Democrats, moderate Republicans. It was a pretty wide movement in the African-American community, and it's one that called for the boycott of stores that served African-American customers but had few, if any, African-American workers.

It was a recognition that the need to improve the situation of African-Americans in Cities like New York depended on both improving their options in the consumer marketplace, but also opening up opportunity for Black workers. While she was there as the head of the Brooklyn YWCA, Hedgeman was a vocal participant and organizer in Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Campaigns there, to the point of which the White patrons of the Black Y in Brooklyn decided she was too fiery, and they canned her from her job.

But this was, by no means, the end of her remarkable trajectory. During the Second World War, an amazingly important moment for African-American activism, as Black activists called for double victory against fascism at home and Jim Crow in the United States, Anna Hedgeman led the effort. She coordinated a campaign in New York City, for example, to desegregate blood banks.

During the Second World War, the military and civilian blood banks took blood separately by race. They did not want Whites to be contaminated by Negro or colored blood. Hedgeman coordinated a citywide campaign, including getting high school students in New York's public schools to study Black and White blood under microscopes, and then to do reports saying, well, we looked, and there's really no difference. It looks exactly the same. We can't tell, looking under the microscope, that there's any difference whatsoever.

At the same time, she worked very closely with A. Philip Randolph, who was launching, at the end of the Great Depression, what would be called The March on Washington Movement. Randolph called for the opening of opportunities for African-American workers in the military industrial complex, or the defense industry, at the outset of the Second World War. To put pressure on the administration, he pledged a massive March in Washington, DC, of African-Americans to demand inclusion in military contracts.

First, Randolph pledged 10,000 would march on Washington, then 100,000 would march on Washington. Marches in Washington have become commonplace to the point of where ho hum, they happen every day. They happen all the time. But the idea of 100,000 African-Americans marching on Washington, especially as the country was unifying for war, was jarring and disturbing, particularly to the Roosevelt administration.

Just before the march was to happen, Roosevelt and Randolph and others met, and Roosevelt pledged to signed an executive order, forbidding discrimination in the defense industry during the Second World War, opening up extraordinary opportunities for African-Americans during the wartime period. It would be the first real breakthrough into well-paid, unionized industrial jobs for Black workers. Anna Hedgeman was a critical partner.

But lest we see this just as a moment of the call for integration, Anna Hedgeman and A. Philip Randolph supported what was a controversial notion in 1941, namely that the March on Washington Movement be all-Black. This was, to many, a sign of a budding racial separatism. And although Anna Hedgeman always supported the notion of racial integration in principle, throughout her career, she was deeply sympathetic to those who called for Black separation.

Indeed, she recalls hearing Malcolm X on the streets in Harlem in the 1950s or early 1960s, and in her words, being profoundly moved by the message that he offered. In looking at Hedgeman's career leading up to the March on Washington, she would move into the Democratic Party and worked for an organization called the Americans for Democratic Action. She was one of its founders.

That brought her into close collaboration with another famous Minnesotan, who she did not know growing up, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, who, in 1948, at the Democratic National Convention, 70 years ago this year, pushed for the Democratic Party to issue a civil rights plank in its platform, leading to the walkout of the so-called Dixiecrats, led by South Carolina Senator, Strom Thurmond, who would eventually run against the Democrats in the 1948 election.

She was there. She was one of the executive committee and co-organizers of the ADA, which included Humphrey and which pushed aggressively, over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, for non-discrimination laws at the national level. 143 times, between 1945 and 1964, Congress considered and voted down what was called then Fair Employment Practices Legislation, or legislation that forbade discrimination in the workplace.

Anna Hedgeman was one of the leaders in pushing the federal government for the passage of that civil rights legislation. She laid the groundwork in her activism. With Randolph, through the ADA, and by pushing for fair employment practices, she laid the groundwork for what would be the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964.

That legislation did not just spring forth from the head of John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson and their aides. It grew out of decades of systemic pressure at the legislative level, through litigation in the courts, at the local and state level, led by activists like Anna Hedgeman, who committed her life to that. That's why she was on the stage at the March on Washington in 1963, because she had been a lifetime consistent advocate from her work with laundresses in Jersey City, through her advocacy for Fair Employment Practices Legislation, a consistent advocate for racial equality among African-Americans.

JOHN WANAMAKER: You're listening to NYU history Professor, Thomas Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty, The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. He spoke last weekend at the Minnesota History Center. Anna Arnold Hedgeman died in 1990, and a center is named for her at Hamline. This lecture continues in just a moment.

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JOHN WANAMAKER: This is MPR News Presents. Now, back to historian, Thomas Sugrue, speaking about the fight for civil rights in the northern states.

THOMAS SUGRUE: I tell you the story of Anna Hedgeman, and there's so much more I could tell. Her life is really amazing, as you've already got a taste of. I tell you the story of Anna Hedgeman to illustrate some of the major themes in the history of civil rights in the North, and why, A, woman like Anna Hedgeman should be front and center in the histories of civil rights that we tell, that we celebrate, that we promote, but B, also, how we can see through her various activities-- and I've just hit the surface.

We can see, through her various activities, the course of the Civil Rights movement in the North and its enormous impact in the United States. So what I want to do for the last few minutes is just to raise a few major points about the African-American freedom struggle in the North that Hedgeman's life demonstrates crystal clear.

One, the distinctions between North and South were far, far blurrier than conventional wisdom leads us to believe. That's not to say that there were no differences between the regions. There were. There were not, in most northern Cities, signs that said Black and white drinking fountains, et cetera. African-Americans had the right to vote in the North, and Hedgeman, working through the Democratic Party, worked to channel African-American votes into political power and influence, part of another thread of the northern freedom struggle that's enormously important, using Black votes to change the system.

But the North was not ever a place of primeval racial innocence. In most of the North, throughout the 20th century, including Minnesota, African-Americans and Whites were very strictly segregated by race, even if by and large, there weren't laws or ordinances or signs marking that segregation. Racial violence was also commonplace.

Of course, Springfield rioted, but even little Anoka, Minnesota, a place that Hedgeman recalled fondly, had a near-lynching in 1931. And this is, of course, in a small Minnesota town, not in the Mississippi Delta or the Black belt of Alabama.

Northern public education was strictly segregated by race. Indeed, several Northern states, up through the mid-20th century, among them Indiana, New York, allowed for the creation of racially separate schools, just like in the Jim Crow South. Indeed, if you were to take a drive through the North, from New England out to the Great Plains, you would find in nearly every town with more than a modest African-American population, there would be a public school named the Lincoln School, or the Mary Church Terrell school, or the Phillis Wheatley school, or the Thaddeus Stevens school, named after important figures in abolition of the Civil war or in African-American history, catering to African-American population.

The most common, Lincoln. If you see a Lincoln School that's been named that way for a long time, you can almost be sure that it had, at some point in its past or in the present, a significant African-American population. Northern Metropolitan areas also had intense forms of Jim Crow of their own. For example, it was pretty much impossible for an African-American to stay in a hotel that catered to whites throughout the North and the West.

Indeed, when Marian Anderson, the great singer, went on tour, she had a stop in Dayton, Ohio, and there, she was actually able to find a hotel that comported with someone of her celebrity and taste for luxury. She was able to find a hotel after her agent went around the entire region to 24 different places to find a place for her to stay. He was able to find her a room in a Whites-only hotel, but she had to take the service elevator, and members of the hotel staff put her in a room right next to the elevator so she wouldn't be spotted by any White customers.

African-Americans traveling through the North also found it was nearly impossible to eat in restaurants that served Whites, all the way through the 1950s. When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. spent time in the North as a theology student, he went, in 1950, to a roadside diner in Maple Shade, New Jersey, where the waitress refused to serve them.

King, knowing civil rights law, knew that New Jersey law forbade discrimination in public accommodations, and he called for the manager and read the manager, almost from his memory, the relevant section of the New Jersey civil rights law, at which point the manager brandished a gun and said, get out of here or you'll face worse. Ultimately, that case never went to trial because there were White witnesses, including three students from a nearby Ivy League institution at which I used to teach, The University of Pennsylvania, who refused to testify that they had seen King mistreated.

When Louis Armstrong, the great musician and one of the richest performers in the United States, traveled to Oakland, California, he and his entourage were able to get seated at a fancy white restaurant, but only with advanced planning and a curtain being placed around their table so that White customers wouldn't notice them in the back of the place. These were commonplace in the North.

In other words, when we look at the North, there may not have been signs, but there was still pervasive Jim Crow. Indeed, all the way through the 1960s, it was commonplace for African-Americans to be denied entrance into pools, into bowling alleys, into dance halls. In New Jersey, there was a nude beach that refused African-Americans to go there because gosh, everyone who lets all their inhibitions down still didn't want to let their inhibitions down and seeing a body of someone who was not White.

So this was a commonplace reality, the norm, not the exception, in the North. Northern activists challenged discrimination in its many manifestations. And this is the next point I want to get to. When we talk about the history of civil rights in the United States, we think about it as an interracial movement, and it was. There were prominent Whites who supported the African-American freedom struggle and worked with people like Anna Hedgeman all along.

But let me put it this way, they were a fringe. The vast majority of Whites in the North, to put it bluntly, and to use a four-letter word, did not give a damn about African-American and discrimination in the period. They did not support the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a majority of Whites in the North believed that he was too radical, pushing too far, pushing too fast. He was not the hero that he would become to generations of Americans thereafter.

The Whites who did join the African-American freedom struggle in the North fell into two categories. They tended to be on the political left or they tended to be members of left-leaning religious denominations, mostly dissenting Protestants and Jews. They were a very, very small subset of the African-American freedom struggle in the North.

So in thinking about the African-American freedom struggle in its history, we have to remember that for all their commitment to integration and inter-racialism, activists, Black activists, usually fought alone. Next, we draw bright lines and bright distinctions in the African-American freedom struggle on those binaries that I talked about earlier between integration and separation, between militancy and nonviolence. But the history of the African-American freedom struggle, both North and South, makes very clear that these binaries make no sense whatsoever.

We saw this in Anna Hedgeman, who, even though she didn't embrace separatism and Black power, was sympathetic to the goal. She understood them. Rosa Parks, who moved to Detroit after the Montgomery bus boycott in 1957, became a staunch ally of the Black Panthers and of Black separatist radicals in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s. Who would have thought that the icon of integration would move that way?

Throughout the North, and indeed throughout the South, African-American activists were improvisational when it came to civil rights. Yes, there were those, like Malcolm X, who believed that Blacks should engage in armed self-defense by any means necessary to defend themselves. And yes, there were advocates of nonviolence, like Bayard Rustin, a Quaker and an advisor to King and a pacifist who was jailed during the Second World War for refusing military service, who believed in nonviolence and would never give it up.

But the vast majority of activists were pragmatic. They would move from one strategy to another, depending on what seemed to be working and what didn't work. So some of the staunchest advocates of school integration in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s became advocates of community control, or Afrocentric education, in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Why? You might say they were being inconsistent, but as they looked onto the reality of deeply segregated schools in every major northern Metropolitan area and saw that no efforts seemed to be succeeding in integrating them, they changed their tactics. So when we take a look at the movement in the North and in the movement in the South, for that matter, we need to see the ways in which activists did not fall down these simple binaries. They were willing to shift strategies, depending on what worked.

The next thing to say is that the African-American freedom struggle has many, many more strands than our conventional narrative leads us to believe. Think about Hedgeman. She was involved in boycotts. She was involved in picket. She was involved in racial uplift. She was involved in interracial dialogue. She was involved working through the political system.

African-American activists worked on many different registers at once to try to change the racial status quo. Activists throughout this period challenged segregation in public accommodations. First, sit-ins at segregated restaurants happened in the North. Labor activists, including Hedgeman, challenged workplace discrimination, and then in the 1960s, began to embrace such race-conscious policies as affirmative action as a way of dealing with the under-representation of African-Americans on the job.

Grassroots activists in nearly every major city from the 1930s on forward worked to try to open up business in the consumer marketplace to African-Americans, including the Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Campaign of the 1930s, and the movement toward Black-owned and Black-operated stores and shops in the 1960s. African-American activists challenged police brutality and discrimination throughout this period, even at a moment when they had very little recourse under the law, laying the groundwork for movements like Black Lives Matter in recent years.

As we take a look at the northern freedom struggle, in other words, we need to look at many different arenas upon which the battles were fought. Some of them succeeded. That is, the opening of the workplace was perhaps the biggest success, particularly for African-American women, whose pay is almost equal with White women today as a consequence of the opening of huge sectors of the economy to jobs.

In other sectors, public education, and especially in housing, the African-American freedom struggle yielded very, very little, largely because of White indifference or White resistance to the integration of their neighborhoods and schools. Anna Hedgeman and a whole cadre of Northern activists who challenged discrimination, segregation, and inequality in different arenas of life laid the groundwork for the movements that we witnessed today.

Her activism and the activism of so many forgotten Northern activists undermined some of the key underpinnings of Jim Crow. Most African-Americans can now go into White-run restaurants or hotels. They won't face the kinds of petty discrimination that they faced, even if there are still troubling incidents that we read about right up to the present day.

Civil rights activists fundamentally changed the discourse about race. It's become much more problematic for Whites in the United States to use explicitly racist language in public, although the arc of justice is perhaps bending a little bit backwards at the moment, when explicit racism now seems to be favored again, at least in some circles in American politics and social movements today. As we look out onto the African-American freedom struggle, we need to understand it in this wide context, and we need to recover the forgotten histories of Anna Hedgeman and many, many, many thousands of people like her.

If we look to every small town, suburb, or city in the United States with any significant Black population, we are going to find stories like Anna Hedgeman's, maybe not quite as influential. If we uncover our local histories, if we dig deep in our local newspapers, if we interview old-timers in our communities from towns as small as Albion, Michigan, or Anoka, Wisconsin, to as big as Chicago and New York, we are going to uncover tens of thousands of more stories that still need to be recovered for us to come to grips with our past and to fully understand our present.

If we want our aspirations, our identities, our understandings of our nation, and our future to advance, if we want to bend the arc of history a little more towards justice, then we need to pay heed to those histories, and we need to think about what they mean for us in the incomplete here and now. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN WANAMAKER: That was NYU history Professor, Thomas Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty, The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. His book starts out with a story of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, and was the first African-American person to graduate from Hamline.

During a lifelong career working for social justice, she was the only woman on the organizing committee for the 1963 March on Washington, and she died in 1990 at the age of 90. There is now a Hedgeman Center for Student Diversity Initiatives at Hamline University, and more information about Anna on the Hamline website and at mprnews.org. This hour's talk by Thomas Sugrue was given last weekend at the Minnesota Historical Society's history forum.