DAVISON M. DOUGLAS. Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Desegregation, 1865-1954. (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 334. $23.99

Abstract

I have frequently informed my students that where school segregation existed in the northern states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was strictly de facto, caused by residential patterns and individual choices, and not de jure, caused by official laws and policies. “Jim Crow,” the deliberate practice of establishing and enforcing a color line by law, was an exclusively southern practice, developed as Reconstruction withered away. I was wrong. Davison M. Douglas shows, in great detail, how state and local officials in many northern states found ways to keep black and white children apart in separate schools. While the various state laws that permitted segregated schooling were repealed within a few years of the Civil War, and most northern states went on to forbid the practice, segregation continued and in fact intensified with the migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from South to North during and after the two world wars. “Government-sponsored school segregation—such as the assignment of black children to separate colored schools or classrooms—persisted in open defiance of state laws in many northern communities until the late 1940s and early 1950s” (p. 8).