Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (review)

Last year I established a program that brought students from my college together with students from an inner-city high school. Not long ago, new testing standards revealed severe problems at this high school regarding students’ abilities to perform the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. To address these problems the administration embraced a “school within a school” approach, which is a rapidly spreading model among struggling inner-city schools. The model encourages administrators to develop “focus schools.” Every focus school has a common core curriculum, but one school might emphasize science and technology while another focuses on English and social studies. Students are then allowed to select the school that suits their interests. This model has enjoyed widespread success in raising student test scores, and our local high school is no different. These successes, however, have not come without a cost, for another effect of this model is what Davison M. Douglas would call de facto segregation. In the case of our local high school, 80 to 90 percent of one focus school is Caucasian and Asian, while 80 to 90 percent of another is African American, and 80 to 90 percent of the third is Hispanic.

Davison Douglas’s Jim Crow Moves North provides a historical context for understanding the “school within a school” model. Douglas’s book, which takes as its purpose the exploration of Northern school segregation from the antebellum era to the 1950s, offers a counterpoint to the common assumption that school segregation was a strictly Southern phenomenon, and that “racial isolation in northern schools has largely been a function of residential segregation” (3). Indeed, conventional wisdom goes further still, assuming that public school segregation ended shortly after the Civil War in the North. Douglas’s book shows to the contrary that although most Northern states outlawed school segregation within 25 years of the Civil War, the practice survived into the 1950s. One of Douglas’s organizing research questions emerges from this dissonance. His book questions the impact of legal rulings on racial change, and he ultimately argues that the history of Northern school segregation demonstrates that laws without social and cultural support have little effect.

Although Douglas’s book offers a number of insights, I will focus on two that seem most relevant to the readership of Rhetoric & Public Affairs. The first emerges as a general understanding of the nature of race relations in the United States, and the second comes in the form of a particularly compelling rhetorical vignette.

Douglas begins in the antebellum North where racism was pervasive, but hopes for racial equality were high and the number of African Americans was relatively low. The link between the scarcity of blacks and the potential for equality would prove decisive in the North. Early in the antebellum era, African Americans made substantial progress in terms of basic rights and equal access to public education. In the 1860s and 1870s political races between Republicans and Democrats were relatively close, often making the black vote the difference. As a result, African Americans had the attention of their elected officials and were able to enact antisegregation legislation in many Northern states.

During the last few decades of the nineteenth century, however, one sees a steady weakening of political power granted to the black community. Douglas highlights two important phenomena that developed in the North over this period: the Republican Party increased its political hegemony and the African American population grew significantly. These two factors conspired to undermine earlier antisegregation laws. Increases in the African American population meant increased tension between whites and blacks over jobs, educational resources, and other government provisions, while Republican hegemony meant the party no longer needed the black vote. Eugenics emerged as a justification for white supremacy during these decades, and in 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson legitimated “separate but equal.”

The events of the nineteenth century set the stage for W. E...