A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Author Todd Robinson will present his recent book, A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a case study of the civil rights era as it happened in  smaller cities. The book focuses specifically on the struggles involving school integration and bureaucratic reforms, as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance in Grand Rapids. Efforts to dismantle structures of racial inequality had a very different flavor in smaller northern cities than they did in other parts of the north, and Robinson’s book adds a new dimension and 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.