All Eyes Are Upon Us ─ Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn

For centuries, the Northeast?home to abolitionism and a refuge for blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South?has presented itself as a model of racial equality. After World War II, the victories of black cultural and political leaders from Jackie Robinson to Ed Brooke to Shirley Chisholm seemed to continue the region’s legacy.

But as historian Jason Sokol reveals in All Eyes are Upon Us, these achievements belied a very different reality for most African Americans, who were shunted into ghettoes and filtered through menial jobs. Northern leaders, conscious of the gap between the region’s political ideals and its deep-seated racism, challenged their constituents to reconcile their practices with their preaching, propelling the region?and the country?along an unlikely path to equality.

All Eyes are Upon Us presents the Northeast as a microcosm of America as a whole: outwardly democratic, inwardly conflicted, but always striving to live up to its highest ideals.

Jason Sokol is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and a Non-Resident Fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. The author of There Goes My Everything, Sokol lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.