THE JIM CROW NORTH.

AuthorBubar, Joe
PositionTIMES PAST

You know about the long fight against segregation in the South. But civil rights struggles in the rest of the nation have often been overlooked.

On February 3, 1964, nearly half a million students-most of them African American and Puerto Rican--joined together to protest segregation in local education. Staying out of class for the day, they marched in front of their schools shouting "Jim Crow must go," held signs with slogans such as "Integration Means Better Education," and sang "We Shall Overcome."

That demonstration, 56 years ago, turned out to be the largest civil rights protest of the decade. But it didn't take place in the South, where you might have expected. It happened in New York City, where public education remained heavily segregated 10 years after the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black children and white children were unconstitutional.

The history of the civil rights movement usually focuses on the South. You know about the sit-ins, boycotts, and marches in places like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, that led to the passage of legislation such as the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which outlawed segregation in public spaces. But state-sponsored segregation also existed in the North, and thousands of people joined in civil rights movements outside the South, from New York City to Boston to Detroit.

So why haven't you heard as much about them?

We often portray racism in the U.S. "as a regional problem, not a national problem," says Jeanne Theoharis, author of a book on the civil rights movement called A More Beautiful and Terrible History. "The tendency when talking about segregation in the North is to say that it's more episodic, and more personal, and not state-sponsored--except that we know that's not the case."

'Separate but Equal'

When you think of Jim Crow laws, which segregated blacks and whites beginning in the late 19th century, you probably imagine separate train cars, bathrooms, and water fountains in the South. But Jim Crow cars segregating blacks and whites actually existed much earlier in the North--for instance, along the Eastern Rail Road, which ran from Boston to Salem, Massachusetts, beginning in 1838, more than 20 years before the Civil War (1861-65).

However, it was in the South where Jim Crow laws became deeply rooted in society after Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War. And the notion of "separate but equal" public accommodations for blacks and whites was embedded in the law with the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (see timeline, p. 20).

Many whites in the South used lynching and other acts of terror to enforce Jim Crow laws. And largely as a result, more than 6 million African Americans fled the South, seeking refuge in the North, Midwest, and West during the Great Migration (1916-70).

Although many black people did find better economic opportunities and a safer environment up North, they also discovered that they hadn't left racism and segregation behind entirely but instead encountered them in new ways.

A common belief about Northern segregation, and one that many journalists and historians reinforced, is that it wasn't written into law but was merely de facto (Latin for occurring in practice)--and was the product of individuals' racism, personal choices about where to live, and financial disparities between whites and blacks.

Indeed, racism by individuals did play a role in Northern segregation. Many landowners in cities in the North refused to rent or sell homes to African Americans, restaurants frequently posted "whites only" signs, and many entertainment venues admitted only white audience members--even if they hired black entertainers, like the famed Cotton Club in New York City.

But that's only part of the story. Federal and local government policies also supported and legalized segregation in the North, says Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

"We've developed a national myth," Rothstein says, "this myth of de facto segregation. We'd rather not deal with it. And so we developed this rationalization to justify our not dealing with it."

The New Deal

Rothstein points out that in the North, as in other parts of the country, the federal government pursued policies that contributed to the segregation and decay of urban areas. For example, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, he launched a series of programs called the New Deal to help bring America out of the Great Depression. One New Deal...

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