The Unreconstructed North

NEWBURYPORT, Mass. — WHEN we think of the South, a host of images come to mind: slaves and masters, Klansmen and freedom riders, magnolias and cotton fields.

Americans have fewer enduring impressions of the North. It simply stands as the nation’s default region. Most Northerners behave as though they come from America writ large, rather than from a subsection of it. The North seems unremarkable. It holds no dark mystery, no agonies buried deep within. We forget that many parts of the North have an identity, culture, politics and racial history all their own.

Americans know that we cannot understand Southern history, or our nation’s history more generally, without coming to grips with slavery and Jim Crow. But we fail to apply this lesson to the North. We like to think that the struggle for racial equality is tangential to Northern history. This leads us to distort our perceptions of the North and to misinterpret American history as a whole.

Northern cities and states have long harbored movements for racial democracy, as well as for racial segregation, within the same heart and soul. Progress and regression have existed together. That duality helps to explain the mind of the North. Only a clearer understanding of the North’s mottled past can enable us to better reckon with this painful moment in our racial history, after the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island and a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer whose chokehold led to his death.

Few have written more eloquently about the North and the South than the historian C. Vann Woodward. In Woodward’s formulation, those who came up in the South shouldered the “burden of Southern history.” The past, defined by slavery and segregation, was something to overcome.

The Northern past admits to no such torment. Tales of the Pilgrims and abolitionists sketch a noble portrait. Northern history looms as a source of aspiration and inspiration. It is something to affirm.

This has been true particularly in the Northeast, which has stood as a place of possibility and a model for the country. To E. B. White, New York was the nation’s “visible symbol of aspiration”; John F. Kennedy saw the democratic institutions of Massachusetts as “beacon lights for other nations as well as our sister states.” These ideals could serve as a spur to action and at some moments, Northeasterners drew upon the region’s mystique in order to propel themselves ahead of the rest of the nation. Yet they could also deploy this mystique as a mask, a way for whites to obscure and excuse their region’s dogged racism and oppression.

The history of the Northeast contains stunning steps toward racial progress as well as vicious episodes of backlash. In 1947, many Brooklyn residents welcomed a black ballplayer and anointed Ebbets Field as the frontier of interracial democracy. At the same time, African-American families from the South were shunted into Brooklyn’s burgeoning ghettos. When Jackie and Rachel Robinson attempted to buy a home in the suburbs of Westchester County, N.Y., and Fairfield County, Conn., they encountered hostile white homeowners who did not want African-Americans as neighbors (although the couple was eventually able to buy a house in Stamford, Conn.).

The story of school segregation is even more insidious. To give one example, the School Committee in Springfield, Mass., pursued redistricting and student-transfer policies that produced virtually all-black schools. African-American parents filed a lawsuit in 1964, and the N.A.A.C.P. took up their case. While on the witness stand, members of the School Committee claimed innocence and ignorance, and denied the very existence of segregation. In 1965, the state of Massachusetts went on to pass a law that outlawed “racial imbalance” — the first such law in the nation. The following year, Massachusetts voters would become the first to popularly elect a black senator, Edward W. Brooke. Just as whites forged a breakthrough in the electoral arena, segregation increased in the schools of Springfield, not to mention Boston.

In 1970, Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut stood on the Senate floor and gave public expression to the region’s open secret. “The North is guilty,” Senator Ribicoff charged, “of monumental hypocrisy” in its treatment of African-Americans. One year later, he proposed a policy that would desegregate every metropolitan school system. The plan was big and bold, and it was to take 12 years. It allowed each locality to determine the specifics. Senator Ribicoff envisioned a combination of strategically located educational malls, magnet schools and redistricting. The N.A.A.C.P. opposed his policy. Black leaders thought that the early 1980s was too long to wait for widespread school integration. Of course, we are still waiting.

Many Americans know New York City’s recent history of racial violence, which includes the killing of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst and Michael Griffith in Howard Beach. But there were many others who are all but forgotten, like Willie Turks, a black transit worker, who was beaten to death by a group of white teenagers in Gravesend in 1982.

Northeasterners do not think of this history as one that shapes our identity. But if we really grapple with the mind of the North, we will be forced to acknowledge, finally, that our region is not just a land of liberty. We will also confront a racial past that is far messier than we might like. It is neither a triumphant story of progress nor a tale of segregation without relief.

We carry the two warring stories with us still. And now we stand at a crossroads. We can summon our better angels, and act forcefully, or we can continue to live like this. Which heritage will we act on? Which story will win out?