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Book Review
| Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 344. $ 25.99 (ISBN 0-521-60783-3).
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| When the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs made her way to the North she expressed surprise and outrage at the discriminatory conduct practiced by northern whites. "[E]verywhere," she wrote, "I found the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people." Reading Davison Douglas's masterful study of northern school segregation from the antebellum era through 1954 leaves one with a similar impression: that race discrimination and prejudice were not a southern phenomenon, and that in the North much like in the South whites did their best to maintain a segregated society. In Jim Crow Moves North, Douglas provides us with a thoroughly researched and fascinating account of school segregation in several northern states. The story told is a complicated one. It pits local school authorities against state Supreme Court decisions, agreed-upon goals against changing circumstances, and blacks and progressive whites against more entrenched and biased views. The journey, however, is well worth it. The reader gains an appreciation of the complex nature of the battle for equal educational opportunities while at the same time emerging from the rubble with a better understanding of what took place. |
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Early on, Douglas charts two themes that remain with the reader throughout the book. The first has to do with the importance of integration in the minds of African-Americans fighting for racial equality in the schools. There is little doubt that education was seen as one of the most important ways to achieve black progress. But there remained—and still remains—disagreement on how to achieve that end. Douglas takes us through the views of the different camps, highlighting at various places the familiar strategy of the NAACP and others to end segregated schools through court petitions, boycotts, and legislative lobbying. Contrasted with this approach were those who often cited the immediate impact of an integrationist strategy on their children and their teachers. For this group, racially mixed schools often meant tough and practical consequences: insults and abuse of black children at the hands of white children and white teachers, the loss of jobs for black teachers (who were generally precluded from teaching in white schools or to white children), and an overall loss of control over how the schools and curriculum were run. Douglas of course does not take sides in this debate; rather, his point is to illustrate that there were no easy routes to the stated goal, and that each approach was met with resistance and enthusiasm, depending on time and place. |
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Douglas's second theme examines the role of the law in affecting social change. One of the more important distinctions between the North and the South was that, for the most part, most northern legislatures banned school segregation and most northern high courts sided with black families when they sued to enforce those rules. But Douglas points out that school segregation was still the norm in many northern communities because school authorities figured out creative ways to get around the law or simply ignored it altogether. In these communities, any number of other considerations—the proximity to southern states where segregationist views remained strong, the size of the black population, the motivation and ability to file lawsuits, the migration of southern blacks to new areas, the fight against fascism, to name a few—often played more of a role than the law in affecting racial change. The point is a good one: the law cannot be separated from its social and political moorings, and often what mattered most to ordinary people was not some abstract rule but what happened right there in their neighborhoods. |
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Which leads me to my final observation: one of the most impressive aspects of Douglas's book is his attention to local disputes. Indeed, Douglas pays far less attention to canonical cases—Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, is mentioned only three times—than he does to places like Alton, Illinois, where blacks boycotted and litigated the town's segregation policies for years, only to have their successes thwarted by an impervious white leadership. But Douglas's emphasis on the details is what makes his contribution so valuable, as he puts the struggle for equal educational opportunities in a whole new light. If it is true that what mattered most to people was primarily a local affair, then it only makes sense to conduct a more focused inquiry. The result, of course, is a complicated picture of race relations—one that stops and starts, fumbles along, gets worse before it gets better—but ultimately is much more satisfying. |
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| Jason A. Gillmer
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| Texas Wesleyan University School of Law |
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