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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 28. The Basis of Social Inequality - 9. Social Segregation and Discrimination in the North
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Chapter !:8. The Basis of Social Inequality 6oi
The federal Reconstruction legislation has taken better root in the North,
When the Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Civil Rights Bill of 1875
unconstitutional, most states in the Northeast and Middle West, and some
in the Far West, started to make similar laws of their own, while the
Southern states, instead, began to build up the structure of Jim Crow
legislation.*
With the ideological and legal sanctions directed against them, sqcial
segregation and discrimination have not acquired the strength^ ’persuasive-
ness or institutional fixity found in the South. Actual discrimination varies
a good deal in the North : it seems to be mainly a function of the relative
number of Negroes in a community and its distance from the South, In
several minor cities in New England with a small, stable Negro popula-
tion, for instance, social discrimination is hardly noticeable. The Negroes
there usually belong to the working class, but often they enter the trades,
serve in shops, and even carry on independent businesses catering to whites
as well as to Negroes. They belong to the ordinary churches of the com-
munity, and the children attend the public schools. Occasional intermar-
riages do not create great excitement. They fit into the community and
usually form a little clique for themselves beside other cliques, but nobody
seems to think much about their color. The interracial situation in such
a city may remain even today very similar to that of Great Barrington,
Massachusetts, some sixty years ago, which W. E. B. Du Bois portrays in
his recent autobiography. Dusk of Dawn.^^
In the bigger cities, even in New England, the conditions of life for
the Negroes have probably never been so idyllic. Since the migration
beginning in 1915, the status of Northern Negroes has fallen perceptibly.®’^
In the Northern cities nearer the Mason-Dixon line there has always been,
and is even today, more social segregation and discrimination than farther
North.
One factor which in every Northern city of any size has contributed to
form patterns of segregation and discrimination against Negroes has been
residential segregation, which acts as a cause as well as an effect of social
distance. This fundamental segregation was caused by the general pattern
for ethnic groups to live together in Northern cities. But while Swedes,
Italians, and Jews could become Americanized in a generation or two, and
disperse themselves into the more anonymous parts of the city, Negroes
were caught in their ‘^quarters” because of their inescapable social visibility j
and the real estate interest kept watch to enforce residential segregation.
With residential segregation naturally comes a certain amount of segre-
gation in schools, in hospitals, and in other public places even when it is
• Sec Section 4 of this chapter; sec also Chapter 29. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont
have no civil rights laws expressly relating to race and color. But there is little social
discrimination’ against their small Negro populations.
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