For Edward Brooke, the North pulsed with promise. Brooke first set - TopicsExpress



          

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. At the same time, an open secret haunted America’s northern states. As the nation gazed at southern whites’ resistance to the civil rights movement—at the Klansmen and demagogues, attack dogs and cattle prods— many recoiled in horror. Northerners told themselves that such scenes emanated from a backward land, a dying region, a place apart. Yet rampant segregation in cities across the country rendered racial inequality a national trait more than a southern aberration. When black migrants streamed north during and after World War Two, James Baldwin reflected, “they do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.” They moved not to New York, but to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant; not to Chicago, but to the South Side; not to Boston, but to Lower Roxbury. Here were the two sides to race in the Northeast, embodied in Brooke’s political success and in Baldwin’s cautionary tale. The cities of the Northeast were simultaneously beacons of interracial democracy and strongholds of racial segregation. (Click Article to Continue)
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 06:15:54 +0000

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