![]() However, Richard Rothstein (2017) extensively problematizes such an interpretation in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. ![]() This reading of history through the de jure/de facto lens can be a way for white northerners to discount the scars of segregation as someone else’s responsibility to address. Specifically, the difference between the South and the North was a distinction between de jure and de facto segregation i.e., between segregation imposed and enforced by law (the South) and segregation that was a result of private choices (the North). While there may have been segregation in northern cities, this was a result of the Great Migration of blacks from southern states to urban areas and the choices of individuals and private organizations, including the phenomenon known as white flight. Southern schools maintained segregation with the blessing of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. ![]() Among the most egregious of these were the Jim Crow laws, which included literacy tests, poll taxes, and segregated public facilities. ![]() ![]() The version of Reconstruction Era history I recall learning in school in the northern United States went something like this: the states of the former Confederacy, sore over their loss in the Civil War and angered by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, enacted laws designed to maintain existing patterns of racial segregation. The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. ![]()
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