The Harlem Renaissance novelist Ann Petry once wrote that her “most humiliating Jim Crow experience” took place in Connecticut, where she grew up. Although Motley’s white friends were not members, they went there often. But with an African-American joining them, “there was suddenly a membership requirement.” The three returned to New Haven, Motley dripping in sweat and stewing in indignation, her white friends having learned an important Jim Crow lesson. But in light of these recent incidents, it would be more accurate to call the forms of Jim Crow that prevailed in the Northeast in the early- to mid-20th century the cutting edge in technologies of exclusion, a sign of things that were to come. It will take more than sensitivity-training sessions and the public shaming of racist, hypervigilant white women to dismantle today’s system of segregation.

Source: New York Times May 27, 2018 22:52 UTC