Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865-1954

In Jim Crow Moves North, Davison M. Douglas tells the story of the struggle of northern blacks against school segregation during the period from the end of the Civil War to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. This battle, according to Douglas, was very different from its southern counterpart and has received scant attention from historians and other scholars. Douglas's starting point is the struggle of northern blacks for access to public schooling in the pre-Civil War period. While the common school movement of the day was promoting the establishment of elementary education, northern blacks were either excluded from such schools or were accommodated in decidedly inferior and segregated settings. It was in that context, Douglas argues, that blacks in the North began to protest their exclusion. The half century following the Civil War, Douglas notes, was a period of legislative progress in the northern states, both in providing blacks with access to public schools and in challenging the existence of segregated schooling. While state supreme courts upheld for the most part those legislative enactments, many local school districts continued to assign black children to schools that were racially segregated. Douglas argues that the increasing black population in the North, in the wake of the migration of African Americans from the South, engendered a pattern of white hostility that perpetuated segregated schools. It was a climate that set in motion the struggle that divided black Americans into two groups: those who supported racial integration and those who favored the creation of separate black institutions.