I grew up in Englewood, New Jersey in the 1960s, and was in elementary school during my city’s fight over school desegregation. My white liberal parents were involved in the struggle to create integrated schools in Englewood (which was achieved almost 10 years after Brown vs. Board of Education!), and the issues were often discussed at our dinner table.
My parents explained to me that there were two kinds of segregation — de jure in the South, where segregation was written into the laws, and de facto in the rest of the country where, as I understood as a child, segregation “just happened.” I’ve since come to understand that these two strategies for racism and exclusion are not as distinct as I learned at home. As James Baldwin said, “De facto segregation means that Negroes are segregated, but nobody did it.”
I began to wonder why, throughout my education, I had never learned about, or thought about civil rights as a national movement — in spite of my own experiences in a city divided between those who were fighting for integration and those who were fighting to keep Black and white children apart.
As part of my recent efforts to relearn my own history, I have read books for adults like “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” by Richard Rothstein (2017), which destroys the myth of de facto segregation, and “The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South” by Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, et. al. (2019). As a longtime educator, I began to wonder about what children were learning today in northern communities about the history of Jim Crow and civil rights protests in their own cities and towns.
I looked for every photo and newspaper article I could find about Jim Crow conditions in the North, and then launched a comprehensive search of picture books that told these stories. Out of 270 books for children about civil rights listed in the New York Public Library catalog, I was able to identify fewer than 10 that told stories of what happened outside the South.
Despite the dearth of books for children about this subject, one can learn a lot from what is available. For example, there are a number of picture books about the Green Book, but only one refuted the myth, perpetuated in the Hollywood movie, that this travel guide for Black families was needed primarily because of Southern racism. From “Going Places: Victor Hugo Green and His Glorious Book” by Tonya Bolden (2022), I learned that the guide was created by a postal worker in Leonia, New Jersey, just a couple of blocks from where I grew up in Englewood. In fact, the early editions (starting in 1946) included only businesses in the New York Metropolitan area. From another picture book, “Lizzie Demands a Seat! Elizabeth Jennings Fights for Street Car Rights” by Beth Anderson (2020) I learned that in 1854 a Black teacher fought her removal from a streetcar in New York City, 100 years before Rosa Parks took a similar stand.
As I examined every civil rights picture book I could find, I also kept my eyes open for middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction that told stories of integration fights in various parts of the country. One of the best I read was “The Color of a Lie” by Kim Johnson (2024), which is a fictionalized account of the racist violence against a Black family in Levittown, Pennsylvania, famous for its restrictive covenants that kept African Americans out of all Levittown developments.
In the hope that more people will read accounts like these, I have put together a bibliography of books on this subject. Many of these books will be on display at Easthampton Public Library (adult and children’s books) and at Forbes Library (children’s only) during the early part of January, just in time for MLK Day. The Jones Library plans to include the bibliography in the CWMars catalog, which will be made accessible to all in the region. I strongly encourage you to buy or borrow these books to deepen your own knowledge or to share with the children in your lives.
This year, let’s make sure that all of us — teachers, librarians, parents, grandparents and children — learn and talk about the Jim Crow era as part of the racist past in all areas of the country, not just in the South. In 2025, let’s make sure we all are inspired by civil rights heroes who fought the good fight not only in the South, but also in NJ, NY, MA, PA and across the U.S.
Alice Levine is an Easthampton resident and a longtime educator who offers training for teachers on using books about diversity and social justice in the classroom. To learn more about her research on Jim Crow North or to suggest additional books, feel free to contact her at alicelevine12@gmail.com.