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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 5. The General Character of Institutional Segregation
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630 An American Dilemma
fighting against affords them the monopolistic basis of their economic
existence.®
In the North the Jim Crow Jaws are absent. In addition, eighteen states
have civil rights acts roughly similar to the kind which the federal govern-
ment was prohibited from having by decision of the Supreme Court in
1883.®^ These laws are not rigorously enforced, and there are all sorts of
ways of getting around them. But their very existence makes institutional
segregation a qualitatively different problem in the North than in the South,
and the scope of these laws is continually being increased.®^ Physical vio-
lence, organized threats, giving Negroes a bad reputation, extensions of
police and court powers and laws are, further, seldom used in the North as
sanctions in enforcing institutional segregation.*" The main sanctions of
institutional segregation in the North are individual protest and refusal
to serve. The individual protester or refuser may be a white store or organ-
ization manager, a white customer, or even—at some risk of legal reprisal
—a white public official. These sanctions are much weaker than any others
used in the South.
Yet there is institutional segregation in the North, and its effects are
far from negligible. Many institutions—^such as schools, parks, playgrounds,
stores, theaters, other places of amusement—have a community basis, and
residential segregation is, therefore, an effective means of getting separate
units for Negroes. Sometimes certain devices are employed artificially to
increase the separating power of residential segregation. School boundaries,
for example, are usually set at the boundary of the white and Negro
neighborhoods: if a white child lives in a ‘‘Negro school district,” he is
readily given a permit to go to another school j
if a Negro child lives in
a “white school district,” he is encouraged and sometimes coerced into
going to a Negro school. Residential segregation is the main cause of insti-
tutional segregation also in other public facilities where it sometimes occurs,
at hospitals, clinics, relief agencies, and so on, in the North.
In private facilities and organizations, however, there is the important
added control of the manager’s or group’s desires. In states where there is
no civil rights law, a manager of any private organization, commercial
or noncommercial, can simply refuse to serve Negroes and may even put
up a sign to that effect. In states where there are civil rights laws, no man-
ager or employee may refuse to Negroes, theoretically, the service that he
* See Chapter 38, Section 10. A Southern white liberal pointed out to me that until com-
paratively recently Charleston, South Carolina, had employcil white teachers in the Negro
schools. He saw in this practice, in such places where the tradition from the ante-bellum
South had been preserved, an example of white people helping the Negroes to. rise. When
I later visited Charleston, the Negroes related to me, as their main success in their fight to
protect their interests, that they had succeeded in driving out the white teachers from the
Negro schools and in giving these jobs to Negroes.
*’See Chapter 24.
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