YPP book club! This Thursday, Matthew Countryman will be at the Penn Bookstore with his book, "Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia".

During the 1940s and 1950s, liberal civil rights groups in the city successfully campaigned for Philadelphia's new City Charter to be the first in the nation to include a ban on racial discrimination in municipal employment, services, and contracts. Within a decade, however, black activists in the city were leading consumer boycotts and street protests against the city's liberal establishment for failing to overcome entrenched structures of racial inequality in labor markets, residential neighborhoods, and public schools. ....

Challenging the view that it was the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power and the rising demands of black activists that derailed the civil rights movement, Up South documents the efforts of Black Power activists in Philadelphia to construct a vital and effective social movement that combined black nationalism's analysis of racism's constitutive role in American society with a program of grassroots community organizing and empowerment. On issues ranging from public education and urban renewal to police brutality and welfare, Philadelphia's Black Power movement remade the city's political landscape. And, in contrast to the top-down middle-class leadership of traditional civil rights groups, Black Power in Philadelphia fundamentally altered the composition of black leadership in the city to include a new cohort of neighborhood-based working-class and female black community activists.

I picked up this book, and am about to start reading it. If anyone else does, tell me and we can totally do an ad hoc book club. I know bits and pieces of the story: the intense murals at the Church of the Advocate, the Black Panther men up against the wall, people lining Girard Avenue under the College gates. I want to know more, and if anyone reading has personal stories of their involvement in or memory of these struggles I would love if you shared them.

So, go to the talk: Thursday February 7 at 5:30 at the Penn Bookstore, 36th and Walnut Streets. And then walk down to the Penn Book Center at 34th and Sansom and buy or order the book, because the Penn Bookstore is owned by Barnes and Noble and you shouldn't support them. Oh and there is totally a paperback that just came out, so even though it printed by an academic press, it's not even too expensive!