This dissertation examines how a militant, broad-based African American civil rights movement reshaped postwar New York City. While it arose from the wartime efforts of Black workers to win equality in industry, it targeted every form of racial segregation and discrimination with a variety of tactics including direct action, lawsuits, political organizing, legislative campaigns, and trade union activism. The first state civil rights laws in the nation were passed in postwar New York and became models for other states and the federal government. The manner of their enforcement, however, sparked a crisis in liberalism that presaged national developments in the 1960s. The state government resisted the movement's focus on outcomes as a measure of equal opportunity as well as the movement's advocacy of affirmative action to achieve integration. The struggle for Black equality emerged as part of the Popular Front--the influential liberal, Communist, left collaboration that sought racial justice and social democracy in the United States. The cold war broke up the Popular Front coalitions, undermining, in particular, the grassroots African American leadership that had brought together the most progressive wings of the labor and civil rights movements. Despite the many obstacles and stiff resistance the movement encountered, its impact was striking. The strategic use of a third party to pressure the Democratic Party to recognize Black demands for inclusion reverberated all the way to Washington. In fact, the political mobilization of Black voters in the North helped shatter the national Democratic Party's accommodation of southern white supremacy.
