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A Kentucky State University professor recently contributed a chapter to a new anthology about segregation.

Mary Barr, assistant professor of sociology at Kentucky State University, contributed a chapter to “The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside the South” (New York University Press, 2019) edited by Jeanne Theoharis, Brian Purnell, and Komozi Woodard.

The 12 original essays in the book show how the Jim Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and political inequality in the nation’s most liberal places; and chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal, economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies, practices, and ideas. Barr and her fellow authors argue that the civil rights and freedom struggles of African Americans are too often confined to the South in America’s historical memory.

In her essay, “Segregation without Segregationists: How a White Community Avoided Integration,” Barr highlights Chicago’s northern suburbs as a critical site of not only racial oppression but civil rights protests and activism, which largely gets projected onto the South exclusively.

Barr tells the story of white activists who learned how to use some tools from the black freedom struggle, like canvassing neighborhoods and questioning residential segregation, to fashion a suburban flank in the Northern movement. If elite schools trained white students to be blind to residential segregation in the Chicago suburbs, then the Black Revolt was a revolutionary school that encouraged them to think for themselves and interrogate the role their suburbs played in building the ghetto walls on the South Side and in erecting racial barriers to integrated housing.

“‘The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside the South’ reminds us that the progress of the civil rights movement has been uneven and that its history in the United States is not merely a history of the American south,” Barr said.