A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

Popular civil rights narratives suggest the crucial activism, interventions, and racism were limited to the American South. This chapter exposes the North’s many efforts to challenge segregation, and it corrects the myth that anti-Black racism was a uniquely Southern issue. The author also stresses that the major civil rights protests and battles in the North spanned decades, from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The chapter discusses two case studies from Northern cities. The first is the long struggle to desegregate public schools in New York. A zoning system purposefully funneled Black and white children into separate schools, but “school officials […] cast the issue of segregation as something beyond [their] control” (37). Commentators invented the myth of “de facto” segregation—segregation that results not from policy but simply from people’s personal decisions. In reality, New York law absolutely enforced segregation. Distorting the causes of segregation became a powerfully persuasive tool in a long and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to genuinely desegregate New York City’s public schools.

While lambasting Southern cities for resisting desegregation, powerful people in New York and other cities outside of the South refused to challenge local systems that formally upheld segregation, like zoning or busing policy. The next case study is Boston.