or that economic discrimination isa far more effective tool, creating an effecient institutionalized racism, all while allowing the smugnesss of ‘at least we aren’t ignorant southerners’
Hmmm…remind me again where the KKK was founded, established its base for further spread and committed its greatest atrocities (remember also that an important part of the KKK’s appeal later on in northern states was its anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic aspects)?
Strawman. No one, least of all me, has said that Northerners were free of racism. What’s been contested is this bizarre claim that there’ve been no regional differences in intensity of racism over, say, the last 100 years.
Nope. As you might have noticed, there’s been a national trend towards migration to the Sunbelt (among people of multiple racial/ethnic groups), and according to one of your own links, it’s not because of racism:
“The southward movement of blacks, Johnson said, started slowly in the 1960s and began to snowball in recent years, driven by two groups. One is made up of blacks who left the region but now are returning to retire or to care for an aging family member. The other one is comprised of younger blacks who have moved to take advantage of employment opportunities in “the new South.””
By the way, blaming economics for the black migration northward in the early 20th century ignores the simple truth that race hate and Jim Crow laws ensured that blacks had the worst of it.
Probably true these days, a much more dubious contention in decades past.
Unless one believes that all those civil rights activists went south in the 1960s merely to cast unfair aspersions on white Southerners, and that poll taxes and literacy tests to block black participation in Southern elections were merely an invention of nasty Northern correspondents?
The South has had a lot of evil history to overcome and the North is by no means blameless. Further progress is not going to be helped by historical denialism.
I think that you can say racism was worse in the south than the north, prior to the Civil Rights Era, because it was institutional. For example, there was a particularly nasty race riot in Chicago just before WWI (which may have involved future mayor Richard “Big Dick” Daley) that started when blacks used a section of beach that was traditionally for whites. This couldn’t have happened in the South. Not only would the police have been prepared to arrest the wandering swimmers, there weren’t any blacks crazy enough to try it in the first place. Also, Daley had a congressman who was pushing for civil rights legislation in the late 50s. This was because there was no poll tax or grandfather clause, and a constituency that large could make demands on politicians.
For an interesting take on discrimination in the 1920s, read the stories and poetry of Jean Toomer. He was a black writer who moved back and forth across the Mason-Dixon Line like an American Milan Kundera.
Where the Klan was founded has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that it found millions of enthusiastic members in the midwest and northeast. That northerners had additional layers of bigotry to exploit doesn’t change the fact that the lion’s share of klan activity in the north as well as the south was directed at the african-american community. I have not said there were no differences in the intensities of racism between the north and south over the years, what I said was that the intense racism of the south was directly related to the high population of african-american people living in close proximity to southern whites. When blacks started moving north in large numbers you see a corresponding rise in the level and violence of northern racism. The fact that prior to the 1920s racist northerners had no black people around them to harm doesn’t mean for a moment that the underlaying attitudes were any less widespread or virulent.
My tongue in cheek comment about blacks moving south to flee northern racism was a joke. I thought that should have been obvious.
The fact that a relative handful of conscientious northerners went south to help (and die in some tragic cases) during the civil rights era is laudable in the extreme, but they were also in the minority. The systemic racism in the poll taxes and literacy tests you mention are a direct result of a racist white population fearing the political power of a voting black minority. There was no comparable fear in the north, again because of the relatively small size of the african-american population in the north. Why would somebody in Maine, or Vermont that was racist go through the bother of getting oppressive laws passed when black voters were a non issue (and still are in those states)? In areas where black political power grew powerful in the north you see violence such as in Detroit or NYC. My whole point is to say that yes, the products of racism were much worse in the south but that is only to be expected when the vast majority of the black population lived in the south. This doesn’t mean that the racism in the north was any less… just that it laid dormant in decades of unchallenged white culture.
Read my very first post, first line… I said “Of course there was more racism in the south”. I’m not quite sure what we are arguing about, exactly.
So in the case of places like New York, Michigan and Illinois which saw substantial increases in the black population, why didn’t a network of Jim Crow laws and anti-voting rights legislation get passed as in the South? Why weren’t White Citizens Councils endemic in the North?
Sporadic outbreaks of violence are not the same as virulent, institutionalized racism.
Were the Northern land deeds not institutionalized?
What specifically are you referring to here, and how does it in your mind equate to the Southern caste system in schools, employment, housing and voting that was commonplace after Reconstruction and up through more than half of the 20th century?
Because they didn’t have time to get passed? Because the framework of oppressive and racially divisive laws that existed in the south prior to the civil war which were easy to fall back on didn’t exist in the north? The period between 1920 to the civil rights era was a period of rapidly organized grassroots racism and there were organized groups formed almost immediately in the wake of the great migration. The Black Legion would be a good example. Policies such as red lining helped keep african-americans marginalized without the need for a messy vote. It seems to me that you may be trying to change the game here midstream, when were we purely speaking about institutional racism?
But those laws were passed within a very short span of time, from 1880-1900. There was plenty of time for northern states to do the same after WWI, but they didn’t. For reasons that have a lot to do with the peculiarity of the southern political system, racist attitudes became legal sanctions in the south, while they weren’t in the north. Maintaining white supremacy was the central goal of southern politics. That wasn’t the case in the north.
According to Paton, it was a common practice in non-Southern states to have clauses in deeds that forbade the selling of the property by the buyer to negroes. Northern bigotry was simply less on-the-table, but it was there in spades. It was also institutionalized, but in a different way. You can Google for a peer-reviewed article from the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, titled, “Discrimination Against the Negro in Employment in New York, 1920-1963” (but you’ll have to pay to read it), and for a book titled Still the Promised City?: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York. These and many other sources document the bigotry that blacks — and other ethnic groups — have encountered outside the Mason-Dixon line. If you’d like to learn more about it, it isn’t hard to find.
Study your history. “Jim Crow” laws in the south replaced the “black codes” which enforced racist policy up through the Civil War. From Wikipedia’s entry on Jim Crow laws:
“The most important laws came in the 1890s with the adoption of legislation segregating railroad cars in New Orleans as the first genuine Jim Crow law. By 1915, every Southern state had effectively destroyed the gains in civil rights and liberties that blacks had enjoyed from the Reconstructionist efforts.”
The North didn’t have “messy” votes establishing comprehensive Jim Crow laws because there simply wasn’t the same intensity of racist feeling. And to remind you again, that’s what this mini-debate has been about - not that racism hasn’t had tangible impact in the North, just that it’s been worse in the South.
Moving on is not aided by denying the past.
In the northeastern states, blacks faced discrimination in many forms. Segregation was rampant, especially in Philadelphia, where African Americans were excluded from concert halls, public transportation, schools, churches, orphanages, and other places. Blacks were also forced out of the skilled professions in which they had been working. And soon after the turn of the century, African American men began to lose the right to vote – a right that many states had granted following the Revolutionary War. Simultaneously, voting rights were being expanded for whites. New Jersey took the black vote away in 1807; in 1818, Connecticut took it away from black men who had not voted previously; in 1821, New York took away property requirements for white men to vote, but kept them for blacks. This meant that only a tiny percentage of black men could vote in that state. In 1838, Pennsylvania took the vote away entirely.
[…snip…]
The situation in what was then the northwest region of the country was even worse. In Ohio, the state constitution of 1802 deprived blacks of the right to vote, to hold public office, and to testify against whites in court. Over the next five years, more restrictions were placed on African Americans. They could not live in Ohio without a certificate proving their free status, they had to post a $500 bond “to pay for their support in case of want,” and they were prohibited from joining the state militia. In 1831 blacks were excluded from serving on juries and were not allowed admittance to state poorhouses, insane asylums, and other institutions.
[…snip…]
African Americans also faced violence at the hands of white northerners. Individual cases of assault and murder occured throughout the North, as did daily insults and harassment. Between 1820 and 1850, Northern blacks also became the frequent targets of mob violence. Whites looted, tore down, and burned black homes, churches, schools, and meeting halls. They stoned, beat, and sometimes murdered blacks. Philadelphia was the site of the worst and most frequent mob violence. City officials there generally refused to protect African Americans from white mobs and blamed blacks for inciting the violence with their “uppity” behavior.Race-based legislation in the North 1807 - 1850
Moving on is not aided by denying the past.
Your going back to the early-mid 19th century does not help your cause, unless you are somehow arguing that things were worse for blacks in the North over that period than the South. And we’d have to see some compelling cites to support that type of historical revisionism.
You were quoted earlier in this thread as saying:
It has been demonstrated here (and is obvious to anyone who has studied the subject) that this is ludicrous.
I don’t agree. I’ve experienced for myself both overt and covert racism. The latter is much more insidious than the former. It’s easier to fight an institution than a ghost.
Nevertheless, as I said, Northern bigotry was institutionalized merely in a different way. As Tocqueville observed:
In the South, the master has no fear of lifting the slave up to his level, for he knows that when he wants to he can always throw him down into the dust. In the North the white man no longer clearly sees the barrier that separates him from the degraded race, and he keeps the Negro at a distance all the more carefully because he fears lest one day they be confounded together.Thirty years later, the Grand Rapids Enquirer & Evening Herald wrote an editorial:
They treat their Negroes, at the South, with a great deal more equality than we do at the North. No northern lady would think of riding in a rail car, with an aromatic negro wench for a companion, but at the South, the wench has just as good a seat as her mistress. There is far more equality between the black and white races in the South, than in the North. This can be seen in the church, in the car or stage coach,
in business transactions, and in the household. The blacks of the South are better treated in every respect, than the blacks of the North; they have more attention and consideration; more care and kindness; better religious privileges; and are happier and healthier. The Southern negro is a prince compared to the kicked, cuffed, and despised Northern negro. These are facts, though our readers may not believe them to be facts but, nevertheless, they are facts and can be seen by any one who will look at Southern life just as it is. If our abolition friends have any tears to shed, let them be shed for the Northern negro, who as general rule, is the most degraded being in our midst.
Please tell me you were joking with that second cite. Sometimes I’m not so sure.
I’m sure he was serious.
Cherry-picking and collecting these sorts of anecdotes is popular amongst Southern historical revisionists. You can even find books claiming that harsh conditions under slavery were a myth and that Southern blacks actually had it pretty good before the Civil War.
*I wanna go back to Dixie
I wanna be a Dixie pixie
And eat corn-pone ‘til it’s comin’ outa my ears
I wanna talk with southern gentlemen
And put my white sheet on again
I ain’t seen one good lynchin’ in years
The land of the boll weevil
Where the laws are medieval
Is callin’ me to come and nevermore roam*
- Tom Lehrer (I Wanna Go Back To Dixie)
In each of these example you’ve cited, a remedy was applied without federal troops being deployed.
And y’all have chosen to ignore every piece of evidence that contradicts you. 
You’re dismissing the direct observations of people like Tocqueville, and Paton (author of Cry The Beloved Country), and contemporary news sources as “anecdotes”. You’ve ignored PBS, William and Mary, the Applied Research Center, and Southern Povery Law, among others. You’ve relied instead on high school common knowledge about laws enacted in the South (while ignoring lesser known laws enacted in the North). But laws don’t make people free from oppression. If they did, the Soviet Union, with its glorious constitution, would have been the most free place on earth. And today, with its 1964 Civil Rights Act, the US would not be seeing an overwhelming disparity among races in terms of imprisonment, poverty, home ownership, and unemployment.
I’m sure we’re both cherry picking to some degree. No one wants to support the other’s argument. But that in itself is very much like what our side is saying here. You accuse us of cherry picking while ignoring that you are doing the same. Likewise, you accuse the South of racism while ignoring and dismissing racism in the North.
Perhaps you should have deployed federal troops to Detroit in 1943. You might have saved the lives of 43 black men.
I know this is the Pit, but this is dishonest debating, Liberal. Yes, we’ve dismissed some anecdotes, like the arguments made by pro-slavery advocates in editorial you cite. I think that’s a pretty safe decision. But we have not dismissed others, like the SPL map. Instead, I showed you how it disproved your own point.
Find me one respected modern historian who agrees with this drivel and we’ll have a basis for further debate.