More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Shadrach Howard, David Ruggles, Frederick Douglass, and others had rejected demands that they relinquish their seats on various New England railroads. They were protesting segregation on Jim Crow cars, a term that originated in New England in 1839. Theirs was part of a larger movement for equal rights in antebellum New England. Using sit-ins, boycotts, petition drives, and other initiatives, African-American New Englanders and their white allies attempted to desegregate schools, transportation, neighborhoods, churches, and cultural venues. Above all they sought to be respected and treated as equals in a reputedly democratic society. Jim Crow North is the tale of that struggle and the racism that prompted it. Despite widespread racism, black New Englanders were remarkably successful. By the advent of the Civil War African American men could vote and hold office in every New England state but Connecticut. Schools, except in the largest cities of Connecticut and Rhode Island, were integrated. Railroads, stagecoaches, hotels, and cultural venues (with occasional aberrations) were free from discrimination. People of African descent and of European descent could marry one another and live peaceably, even in Maine and Rhode Island where such marriages were legally prohibited. There was an emerging, if still small, black middle class who benefitted most. But there were limits to progress. A majority of African-Americans in New England were mired in poverty preventing full equality both then and now.
Gail Schecter, “The North Shore Summer Project: 'We're Going to Open Up the Whole North Shore,'” in The Chicago ... Michael H. Ebner, Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.
The book ultimately dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism actually originated in the North.
This book is a comprehensive study of the Jim Crow laws in North Carolina from 1865 to 1920.
Davison Douglas examines why so many northern communities did engage in school segregation (in violation of state laws that prohibited such segregation) and how northern blacks challenged this illegal activity.
64 Finally, two white WinstonSalem women were riding bicycles near the R. J. Reynolds stemmery when the shift ended and African American women were pouring into the streets. The cyclists “turned into a narrow path to avoid meeting” the ...
Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement
Davison Douglas examines why so many northern communities did engage in school segregation (in violation of state laws that prohibited such segregation) and how northern blacks challenged this illegal activity.
This is a resource on racism and segregation in American life.
Her father, an Alabama black belt farmer who eventually managed to buy land, seldom allowed his children to go to town, and “when we went to town,” Brooks recalled, “we didn't hang around, because my father told us, 'You go into town, ...
On August 24, 1955, in a country store in Money, Mississippi, the fourteen-year-old from Chicago may have grabbed the wrist of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, may have said something “obscene” to her, and may have let out a wolf whistle ...