Jim Crow North

The struggle to overcome Jim Crow was part of a larger movement for equal rights in antebellum New England. Using sit-ins, boycotts, petition drives, and other initiatives, African American New Englanders and their white allies attempted to desegregate schools, transportation, neighborhoods, churches, and cultural venues. They worked to secure the franchise, improve educational opportunities, enlarge employment prospects, remove prohibitions against mixed marriages, and protect fugitive slaves from recapture. Above all they sought to be respected and treated as equals in a reputedly democratic society. Despite widespread racism, by the advent of the Civil War, African American men could vote and hold office in every New England state but Connecticut. Schools, except in the largest cities of Connecticut and Rhode Island, were integrated; railroads, stagecoaches, hotels, and cultural venues (with occasional aberrations) were free from discrimination; people of African descent and of European descent could marry one another and live peaceably; and fugitive slaves were safer in New England than in any other section of the United States. Most African Americans in New England, nonetheless, were mired in poverty, and that is the barrier that prevented full equality, then and now.