The North isn’t better than the South: The real history of modern racism and segregation above the Mason-Dixon line

The North celebrates its liberalism, but that disguises a complicated relationship with discrimination, inequality 

by Jason Sokol

Excerpted from "All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn"

For Edward Brooke, the North pulsed with promise. Brooke first set foot in New England during World War Two, when his army regiment trained in Massachusetts. He was a native of Washington, D.C., and Washington  was a Jim Crow city. When the war ended, Brooke moved to Boston and enrolled in law school. He voted for the first time in his life. And he did much more. Brooke  was elected the state’s attorney general in 1962; four years later, he won election to the United States Senate. Brooke achieved all of this in a state that was 97 percent white. What constituted political reality in Massachusetts—an African American man winning one million white votes—was the stuff of hallucinations below the Mason-Dixon line.
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