Off Camera: Civil Rights in the North (Page 2)

One of the most insistent lessons of Sweet Land of Liberty is that not all Northern segregation was created equal--and that the more segregation created channels of economic opportunity for white parents and their children, the more fiercely it was defended. Activists were generally able, through cunning and courage, to dismantle segregation where wealth seemed less at stake--for instance, in the realms of public accommodation and amusement. Take the case of the NAACP campaign against the RKO chain, which, like many Northern movie theater chains in the 1940s, found ways to turn away black patrons while publicly conforming to antidiscrimination statutes. Its ticket sellers would not overtly reject black customers: they simply would stop work when blacks arrived at their counter or find some other means of delaying the sale.

In response, the NAACP's Cincinnati chapter fashioned a two-pronged campaign of litigation and civil disobedience. A black model citizen--James Smith, a "brilliant student and star athlete" at the University of Cincinnati--approached an RKO ticket counter, accompanied by three sympathetic whites. (The NAACP knew that only white testimony would be given sufficient credibility in the courts.) After he was refused service, Smith became a plaintiff in a lawsuit against RKO, repeatedly turning down RKO's settlement offers in order to tie up the company's lawyers.

Meanwhile, the NAACP organized dozens of "theater excursions" inspired by the Smith episode--more model black citizens queuing up, more white witnesses trained to observe discriminatory practice in all its particulars. Ticket sellers would sit silent rather than provide fodder for litigation, and the theater's business often shut down for as long as a half-hour as employees scrambled to resolve the impasse. The campaign lasted nearly a year, but on May 24, 1941, RKO officially embraced nondiscrimination--a clear triumph for the NAACP, which, in Sugrue's account, is credited with being more grassroots oriented and strategically imaginative than is commonly assumed.

By contrast, those activists who took on educational inequality and housing discrimination secured fewer straightforward victories. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, while directed toward Southern schools, had a galvanizing effect on Northern blacks, who seized upon its argument that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal"; the phrase offered hope that, whether or not a school district explicitly separated students by race, the courts would remedy instances of de facto segregation. Before Brown, Northern efforts to desegregate schools had tended to be located in smaller towns like New Jersey's Toms River, Montclair and East Orange, where black communities were close-knit and segregation could be seen as a small-scale human failing. After Brown, the fight widened to larger cities and the structural patterns that lay behind educational inequity: segregation in education was tied, through the concept of the "neighborhood school," to segregation in housing, and one could not be tackled without the other.

The 1960 campaign to desegregate New Rochelle schools suggests the inventiveness and tenacity of these post-Brown activists--and, again, of local chapters of the NAACP. The campaign's flash point was the Lincoln School, which was attended overwhelmingly by black students and was so dilapidated that its building was sheathed in scaffolding to guard against falling bricks and concrete. The New Rochelle school district wanted to renovate the building; the NAACP, with the support of New Rochelle's black parents, argued that the school should be closed down and its students transferred to other schools in the district. As the NAACP prepared its lawsuit in the fall, the black mothers of New Rochelle adopted a parallel strategy of direct action. They boycotted the Lincoln School, attempted to register their children at all of New Rochelle's white-dominated elementary schools and staged sit-ins and marches on their campuses to draw media attention. New Rochelle was dubbed the "Little Rock of the North"; even Ghana's prime minister Kwame Nkrumah blessed the effort.

The white parents of New Rochelle countered, in an argument that would gain traction over the coming decades, that they were colorblind liberals acting in the best interests of all New Rochelle children, black children included, by refusing to adopt a transfer policy based on race. "Nothing makes my blood boil more," said New Rochelle's school board president, "than a letter from the white citizens' council saying 'keep up the good work.'" The response was typical: by 1963, 75 percent of Northern whites said they supported the Brown decision--in effect, disassociating themselves from archsegregationists--but few supported desegregation measures in their own backyard.

In this superheated atmosphere, the NAACP filed its suit and won--Lincoln was demolished, black students were transferred--but on a larger level, the protests in New Rochelle and other Northern cities had a mixed effect. As a rule, the more integrated a school district became, the more white parents sought a way out--by moving to more "exclusive" neighborhoods or transferring their children to private schools--and, as a result, school districts often resegregated over time. Equity in education was a moving target. Paul Zuber, who had spearheaded the legal case in New Rochelle, persevered and ratcheted up his rhetoric. "Residents of expensive homes are not entitled to a public school attended only by children whose parents own expensive homes," he argued in 1962. "The North has a choice. They can desegregate voluntarily, or they will be forced to do so." Other activists, though, started to question whether it made sense to double down on the fight for integrated schools: perhaps it was better, given the rancor stirred by desegregation, simply to call for urban schools to be adequately funded and more accountable to the communities they served.

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