From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
Prior to and following the war, the North’s Black hatred proved nearly equal to their Southern brethren’s. A free Black man said it simply: “This northern freedom is nothing but a nickname for northern slavery.”
Rather than slavery, Black Laws laid the racist train lines in the North. Prefiguring aspects of the Jim Crow South, the Black Laws of Northern states inverted the Bill of RIghts and segregated everything: housing, entertainment, religious worship, education, voting booths, labor laws, criminal justice systems, transportation, orphanages, and health care. Northern segregation extended from the land of the living to the cemeteries that entombed the dead. Midwestern states made Black Americans’ entrance across their borders a crime. The typical reception of Black people in the Midwest was emblazoned into the name of a piece of Illinois legislation: Act to Prevent Free Negroes into this State.
Anti-Black racism was also the law in the Northeast. In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson examines Philadelphia’s racial atmosphere. “The ‘city of brotherly love,’” she writes, “experienced seven major antiblack and anti-abolitionist riots over the course of the 1830s and 1840s.” A full fifty years after Pennsylvania embraced the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 to end slavery in the state, Philadelphia was no haven for Black America but instead a dangerous mix of abolitionist allies and racist vigilantes.