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Originally Posted by Royal Eagle
The Jim Crow society and strict segregation that most people think it was first created in Mississippi and other southern states...in fact they were created in the Northern cities before the Civil War.
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That is definitely a good point that anti-black sentiment in the North during slavery was very strong and often violent. Nonetheless, there were also strong abolitionist forces and opportunities available to blacks in the North that were not available to them in the South.
And while the Jim Crow segregation laws that came into force in the South after slavery may have taken their cues from the North, those kinds of laws were designed to limit black citizenship following emancipation... something that was unnecessary in the South when blacks simply weren't citizens at all but merely chattel.
Actually, if you check, there weren't a lot of laws regulating black and interracial behaviour in Southern states precisely because black people were objects and not subjects, and so there was no need for such laws. As an extension of the master, slaves were beholden to his wishes. After slavery - Reconstruction - there is an explosion of laws and court cases trying to limit citizenship and effectively re-enact slavery (or at least segregation) within the realm of black political freedom.
I'm not trying to present the North as a wonderful place or anything like that, but at the very least there was at least some political and legal recognition of black autonomy (even if it was severely limited) that was absent in the slave states.