Racism in the Civil Rights Movement

The Long Movement Outside the South by Jeanne Theoharis tells the story that racism was not just a problem in the South, but it also was a bigger problem than most people thought in the North. Many people think of the Civil Rights Movement as something that mainly happened in places like Alabama and Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws made segregation very obvious. But Theoharis shows that racism was also a big issue in the North, just in a different way. In cities like New York and Boston, black students went to schools that were overcrowded and underfunded. Even though segregation wasn’t officially written a law it still was very prevalent. The way schools were zoned meant that black students were stuck in poorly maintained schools with fewer resources. When activists tried to fix this, they were met with strong resistance from school officials and local politicians who refused to admit there was a problem. This struggle for better schooling for black students showed that racism was affecting people all over the country.

White liberals in the North played a big role in keeping segregation in place, but they did it in a more subtle way than people in the South. Instead of openly saying they didn’t want integration, they used coded language that made it sound like they had other concerns. They talked about wanting to protect neighborhood schools, making it seem like they were only interested in keeping kids close to home. They also said they cared about quality education and parental choice, which made it sound like they just wanted what was best for children. But these phrases were really just ways to avoid integrating schools. Instead of saying they didn’t want black students in their schools, they made it about protecting their own children’s education. This allowed them to resist integration without sounding openly racist. Theoharis points out that these arguments were very effective because they made it harder to accuse Northern leaders of discrimination, even though their policies still led to segregation. White people also used coded language when it came to black people finding neighborhoods to live in. This was a big issue and many black people were not given the opportunity to move into better neighborhoods because of racism in the real estate business. Even when laws were passed to ban housing discrimination, white communities often resisted integration in more subtle ways, like creating neighborhood associations that worked to keep black families out.

Reading this article definitely did surprise me because I was not aware of the extent of the racism and how serious it was that was occurring in the North. I had always known that there was racism across the country, but I had always figured that in the North it was never that bad because they were considered to be the free states. So it caught me off guard to hear all of the history about how strongly Northern leaders and white liberals fought against integration while still claiming to support civil rights.