Was the Civil Rights Movement restricted only to the South: An Eternal Debate

The Civil Rights Movement, which began in 1954, was a social movement that aimed to eradicate racial segregation and discrimination. The narrative built around the Civil Rights Movement insinuates that the Civil Rights Movement was exclusive to the South. However, contrary to the well-prevalent belief that the Civil Rights Movement was restricted to only the South, the Civil Rights Movement was also a dominant force in the North, with examples being New York City, Boston, and even Los Angeles. Jeanne Theoharis, in her book “A More Beautiful and Terrible History,” states that” When the actions of Northern Black people appear in popular tributes to the era, they tend to show up in the later 1960s…. these public accounts miss nonviolent, disruptive struggles from New York to Boston to Los Angeles…” (Theoharis). Events like the February 3, 1964, protest in which almost half a million teachers and students protested the New York City Board of Education’s repudiation to create a comprehensive school desegregation plan serves as a prime example that the Civil Rights Movement. This protest was the consummation of a decade of strenuous work done by people like Reverend Milton Galamison, Ella Baker, and Mae Mallory.

The board of education in New York was at the forefront of the fight against desegregation in schools of New York City. It used an assortment of tactics to ensure that desegregation didn’t occur in the schools of New York City and did, in fact, use coded language to avoid accusations of racism, e.g., William Jansen, The Superintendent of Schools, instructed his staff to avoid using the word segregation and to use words like “ separate” and “racially imbalanced.” Furthermore,  when he attacked Kenneth Clark’s allegation of the segregation in New York being systematic, he stated that segregation in schools was not intentional, it was simply a result of the housing segregation. Moreover, public officials or white liberals in New York labeled segregation as “ racial imbalance” and “separation and also discursively blamed the parents of Black students as  being “culturally deprived.” Therefore, indirectly insinuating that the reason for people of color not being successful is simply because they’re not as culturally gifted as white people. In addition, as a consequence of this labeling, the segregation in the North was pigeon-holed as being “de-facto” in contrast to being pigeon-holed as “de-jure”  in the South.

Additionally, like New York, despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case decision rendering segregated schools unconstitutional, the schools in Boston also remained segregated. The Boston Busing crisis during the 1970s serves as a good example and was also a focal point of national attention. This crisis was the result of the ruling of a federal court to start the process of desegregation through busing; this ruling led to violent protests and pervasive opposition by white residents, predominantly; the anti-desegregation demonstrations on September 12, 1974, served as a good example of how white people reacted against the federal court ruling of Judge Garrity, white people in these demonstrations harassed black students and thousands of white families kept their children at home in preference to sending their children to desegregated schools.  In summation, it’s fair to say that the Civil Rights Movement was not only prevalent in the South but was also prevalent in the North. It is how it is framed in history and how it affects the parable of how “… Northern good guys went South to support the movement- and show how white Northerners disparaged and quelled movements in their own backyards…”  that restricts the Civil Rights Movement to the narrative of the South.

I was indeed surprised by this history as where I come from, people were and never have been ridiculed and persecuted based on their color. It comes to me as a surprise how people based on the simple distinction of color can be so hellbent on making the lives of the color they deem inferior so miserable.