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Jim Crow in the North

A new history examines the struggle to integrate above the Mason-Dixon Line.

By Lewis M. Steel

For generations, the North has given itself credit for being less racially biased than the South, and for being the better place for African Americans to live. The logic was straightforward — at least to Northerners. After Reconstruction ended in 1876, the South imposed Jim Crow, which it enforced with lynchings and state-sanctioned brutality. As a result, millions of blacks fled… return to article

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Also by Lewis M. Steel
  • Jim Crow in the North
    A new history examines the struggle to integrate above the Mason-Dixon Line.
  • A Dream Deferred
    Only sustained community activism will reverse the Supreme Court's most recent betrayal of Brown v. Board of Education
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