Talk reveals vast school segregation in North

Historian puts New Jersey among top five states with the most segregated schools

By: David Campbell
   New Jersey is among the five states in the nation with the most segregated public schools, 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue said in a lecture Wednesday at Princeton University.
   "Rethinking Brown: The Unfinished Struggle for Equal Education in the 20th-century North" was the topic of Professor Sugrue’s talk at Dickinson Hall, the home of the history department at Princeton.
   The struggle for racial equality for blacks in the South has been extensively chronicled in history books, but not so for the North, the professor said.
   And today, contrary to what many might believe, it is the northern states and its public schools, not those in the South, that remain the most segregated years after the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in schools.
   The five states where patterns of segregation are still most deeply entrenched are New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio, Professor Sugrue said.
   He presented several case studies of struggles by local grass-roots black activists in the North to integrate the public schools in their communities; their at times uneasy alliances with national activists and litigators; and the ways whites in those towns sought to maintain "de facto segregation" in their schools.
   He noted that while Jim Crow — government-sanctioned racism and segregation in the United States after the Civil War — had "one face" in the South, it was "protean" and "multi-headed" in the North, and yet with discernable patterns.
   Northern communities in effect had education systems akin to those in the Jim Crow South, he said, noting how in almost any town in the North a separate black school, often called "Lincoln" schools after the Civil War president, could be found.
   These schools were "largely shabby affairs," small and rundown. The laws in some states prohibited school segregation, but local officials typically flaunted the law and excluded black youngsters from white schools, for example in Ohio, Professor Sugrue said.
   School boards in the North "gerrymandered" the borders of sending districts for neighborhood schools to keep black school children segregated. Where the demographic was too mixed to do so, such as in cities, other tactics were employed, he said.
   In Chicago and Philadelphia, for example, black youngsters at predominantly white schools were confined to special-education programs. Black public-school students in Detroit were kept in vocational courses. In Cape May, black and white children played in separate playgrounds kept apart by a barbed-wire fence, he said.
   In one case study he presented of Hillburn, N.Y., local civil-rights activists during World War II employed the wartime pro-democracy rhetoric and linking Jim Crow with fascism to challenge the black school there in 1943.
   Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP civil-rights lawyer who went on to be the first black Supreme Court justice, was invited by local activists and they eventually forced the school board to close the black school.
   But when black children showed up to start classes at the white school, Professor Sugrue said, the white children were no longer there — their parents had enrolled them in private and Roman Catholic schools.
   In another example, he described local civil-rights activists in the 1960s in New Rochelle, N.Y., who boycotted the Lincoln school there, employing the tactics of southern black activists like staging a sit-in, and also filing a lawsuit.
   The neighborhood schools concept — used by whites to perpetuate segregation — was eventually not upheld in the courts, with a judge ruling it ran contrary to the 1954 Brown decision. But "white intransigence" continued — if blacks wanted to attend white schools they would have to provide their own transportation, which many could not afford.
   Professor Sugrue is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
   A leading scholar of 20th-century American history, he is the author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Suburban Detroit."
   The History Department at Princeton sponsored the lecture Wednesday.