Contact Information
Biography Information
Jason Sokol is an American historian. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. His first book, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. In 2008 and 2009, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum. From 2006 to 2008, Jason was Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. His writings on America’s racial history have appeared in the Boston Globe, American Prospect, The Nation, and a variety of scholarly journals. Jason teaches courses on African American history and the civil rights movement as well as politics and culture in twentieth-century America.
Jason grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and attended Oberlin College. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1999, with Highest Honors in History. Jason will split his time this year between Cambridge and Philadelphia, where he currently lives with his partner Nina Louise Morrison.
Project Description
The Northern Mystique explores the Northeast’s progressive mythology alongside its history of black struggle. The corridor from Boston to Brooklyn fashioned a reputation as the nation’s motor of political liberalism and racial progress. This region was the historic home of abolitionists and suffragists, of high politics and higher education; it boasted the “city upon a hill” as well as the melting pot that was New York. Yet an open secret has long haunted America’s northern states. When black migrants streamed north during and after World War II, James Baldwin reflected, “they do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.” Rampant segregation rendered racial inequality a national trait more than a southern aberration.
This book probes visions of racial democracy while it charts deepening racial inequalities. It presents an interracial history, as often seen through electoral politics. In the Northeast, African Americans made gains at the ballot box and even won white votes. At the same time, the structures of segregation – particularly in urban neighborhoods and schools – proved difficult to pierce.
The Northern Mystique starts in World War II and carries the story up to the present. It unfolds Jackie Robinson’s stunning breakthrough in 1947 alongside a more austere social history of Brooklyn at mid-century. It chronicles the 1966 election of Ed Brooke, the first black senator since Reconstruction – but also shows that whites in Massachusetts were resisting school integration at the same time they pulled levers for him. It details Shirley Chisholm’s election as the first black woman in Congress, and argues that the solidification of urban ghettoes was the price of black political power.
The book continues up through the 1970s and the 1980s, to the last decades of the twentieth century, and into the present. The final chapter explores the history of African Americans who won major elections during the last twenty years: David Dinkins in New York City, John Daniels in New Haven, and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts. They revealed black politicians’ specific sources of interracial appeal and anticipated the obstacles that would arise for their successors.
In the realm of electoral politics, more so than in housing or schools, the Northeast substantiated its reputation as a place of racial progress. By studying political campaigns as well as social history, I analyze the difference between symbolic racial advances on one level – and changes in the structures of everyday life on another. The project as a whole often pivots on this distinction. It presents an original interpretation of the struggle for racial democracy in the North as it paints American political history in a brand new color.