The Jim Crow North: You probably know about the long fight against segregation in the South. But civil rights struggles in the rest of the nation have often been overlooked.

A pretty interesting and informative article on how segregation and Jim Crow laws are by no means exclusively southern, northern laws were existent before the Civil War, and the assumption than northern racism wasn't state-enforced. as untrue. There's also this article on the origins of Jim Crow-esque segregation and this other article on how racism has a large presence in the north

On February 3, 1964, nearly half a million students—most of them African American and Puerto Rican—joined together to protest segregation in local education. Staying out of class for the day, they marched in front of their schools shouting “Jim Crow must go,” held signs with slogans such as “Integration Means Better Education,” and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

That demonstration, 56 years ago, turned out to be the largest civil rights protest of the decade. But it didn’t take place in the South, where you might have expected. It happened in New York City, where public education remained heavily segregated 10 years after the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black children and white children were unconstitutional.

When you think of Jim Crow laws, which segregated blacks and whites beginning in the late 19th century, you probably imagine separate train cars, bathrooms, and water fountains in the South. But Jim Crow cars segregating blacks and whites actually existed much earlier in the North—for instance, along the Eastern Rail Road, which ran from Boston to Salem, Massachusetts, beginning in 1838, more than 20 years before the Civil War (1861-65).