Jim Crow North, the Law and Law Enforcement

Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about “cultures of poverty,” policies focused more on black criminality than black equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing, and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into social pandemics. Liberalism, rather than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North gave racism new and complex places to hide. Americans in the North made this history. They tried to unmake it, too.Join The Peoples Forum and the editors and contributors of the anthology The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019) for a two-day investigation into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow.