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10. Racism and segregation in education are national - not only southern - realities.

  1. Racism and segregation in education are national - not only southern - realities.

While many accounts of Jim Crow segregation focus on the South, segregation was, and is, a northern reality too. It has been convenient for white New Yorkers to focus on racism elsewhere, and to think of themselves as innocent or free of connection to histories of slavery, segregation, and racism. But that is not what historical evidence shows.1

People of African descent were enslaved in New York and elsewhere in the North. Slavery, which disabled many people through violence, overwork, and neglect, did not end in New York State until 1827.2 The New York State Constitution allowed school districts to operate separate segregated schools designated for Black or white students until 1900.3

Jim Crow was a system of legal and extralegal violence designed to terrorize, oppress, and control Black people politically, economically, and socially. Even before Jim Crow developed in the South in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s, white northerners developed laws and policies that segregated schools, housing, and employment. For example, white New Yorkers restricted Black New Yorkers to living in some portions of the city (where they were more likely to experience disabling environmental conditions) and to work primarily in lower-paid and often physically demanding jobs (where they were more likely to be injured and become disabled). In addition, Black New Yorkers faced violent treatment at the hands of the New York City police. Until the 1950s people of color in New York had limited power to influence their city through electoral politics.4 The city government favored white neighborhoods with better services in education, health, sanitation, and transportation. These forms of state-sanctioned structural discrimination and violence exemplified the “Jim Crow North.”

The history of institutional and structural racism in housing, employment, wealth, poverty, incarceration, and opportunity shape NYC to this day. So do present-day racist and ableist policy choices.

  1. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017); Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis with Komozi Woodard, eds., The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (New York: New York University Press, 2019). See also: Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. ↩︎

  2. [New-York Historical Society, Slavery in New York](New-York Historical Society, Slavery in New York). ↩︎

  3. Zoë Burkholder, An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). ↩︎

  4. Craig Steven, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn 1636-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Shannon King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2021) ↩︎