"A City within a City" examines the civil rights movement in the North by concentrating on the struggles for equality in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Historian Todd Robinson studies the issues surrounding school integration and bureaucratic reforms as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance. He focuses on respectability within the African American community as a way of understanding how the movement was formed and held together. And he elucidates the oppositional role of northern conservatives regarding racial progress.
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"A City within a City"...

'A City Within a City' is a case study of the civil rights era as it happened in smaller cities, focusing specifically on the struggles involving school integration and bureaucratic reforms in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The efforts to dismantle structures of racial inequality had a very different flavour in smaller northern cities than they did in other parts of the north, and Robinson's book adds a new dimension to our understanding of how the civil rights movement operated in a part of the country that has only recently become an object of focus among historians.