Northern Racial Attitudes and Integration

Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty
Thomas J. Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty

American North

Here’s an excerpt from Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North about the shift in White Northern racial attitudes between the 1940s and 1960s:

“Survey researcher Paul Sheatsley examined responses over more than two decades to the question “If a Negro with the same income and education as you moved into your block, would it make a difference to you?”

In 1942, only 42 percent of northern whites would have approved of such a black neighbor; by December 1963, 70 percent of whites claimed they would accept such a neighbor. The shift in attitudes about housing tracked other major changes. By similar figures (40 percent in 1942, 75 percent in 1963), northern whites agreed with the statement that “white students and Negro students should go to the same schools.” And in 1963, four-fifths of northern whites agreed that “Negroes are as intelligent as white people.” …

Longtime open housing activist Charles Abrams was thrilled at the “almost complete shift, particularly in the North and West, in the public feeling about discrimination and racial prejudice.”

Note: This comes as no surprise to me. I’ve been familiar with the polling data on White racial attitudes since college.

Between the Second World War and 1964, twenty-nine states outside the South enacted fair employment practice laws. Even before the Second World War, eighteen Northern states already had public accommodations anti-discrimination laws, and six more Western states had passed anti-discrimination laws by 1959.

Eventually, we’re going to get into the Jewish role (there’s a lot of useful information in this book about this) in bringing about this change in Northern public opinion. We have already seen how the Quakers were “the most visible white dominated group in the civil rights movement besides the Communists.”

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17 Comments

  1. The ‘Pennsyltuckian’ area of this state has been ranked third most racist (white racist) area in the nation in a recent university study, which shouldn’t be possible according if the ‘contact theory’ is true, since it is still about 98% non-Hispanic white. I believe Mississippi ranked first, and the second was also in the deep south.

  2. The popularised Stephens-Davidowitz study correlating racist Google searches with voting patterns put it in second place, after West Virginia. Undoubtedly, there is considerable VARIATION in thinking north of the Line (though probably not s0 in New England).

  3. Lol. “Housing activist” Charles “Abrams”.

    Like a famous person said:

    “Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one [X] involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a [X]!”

  4. I’ll bet that a lot of it correlates well with Kevin MacDonald’s arguments. Subversive activity is not performed in the public eye and in a suspicion arousing context. This is why the popularity of figures as wide ranging as Susan B. Anthony, MLK, Jr., Ted Kennedy/Bill Clinton, The Beatles, Sinatra, and yes even Lincoln, were and continue to be promoted and financed “behind the scenes”. They provide the illusion of popular support (for Marxist social policies) and of peer involvement.

    The true picture is that of subversives hiding in our midst, in plain sight, and leveraging vast media and financial resources to persuade through bribery and dissimulation, goy shills and useful idiots to sell-out their kin and country. Sheldon Adelson and George Soros come to mind.

    This may have been less of an issue in centuries past, but what we are facing today is due mostly to the momentum they accumulated throughout the 20th century.

  5. @Hunter Wallace: “There’s a lot of stuff in here about the Jews.” Since the Romans invaded Judea the Jews have been waging a race war against White Europeans. According to Keith Alexander we need a bumper sticker: IT’S RACE, STUPID!
    According to John C. Calhoun (June 27, 1848, Speech on the Oregon Bill), Mr. Jefferson took “an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South” and held “that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral.”
    http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/oregon-bill-speech/
    “When the race war ultimately breaks out, you won’t have to worry about which side you’re on – the other side will tell you.” – Keith Alexander, TPC, 3/10/2012 Hour 1
    http://www.libertyroundtable.com/tpc/political-cesspool-sat-2012-03-10-2038/

  6. I think the major question to be asked, is: “What (or who) changed White Attitudes during those two decades from 1940-1960?”

    Next, what can we do to change them back, now that we have the impartial education, crime, demography stats that show that:
    a) Blacks are 10 times more crime-prone
    b) less smart, intellectually, both in IQ as well as on a delayed gratification scale
    c) destroyers of neighborhoods, cities, and states.

    Data determines destiny. Can we please use the data that tells the truth, instead of the purely religious data of liberalism, that can only keep up the charade of ‘Equality’ as a faith paradigm?

  7. @TJ “… subversives hiding in our midst, in plain sight …” White Europeans and East Asians seem to be the only two groups who are not subversive of an orderly society.
    “It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant.” – Victor Davis Hanson
    http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/255320/two-californias-victor-davis-hanson
    http://www.vdare.com/articles/lynns-race-differences-in-intelligence-pc-wont-make-them-go-away
    Consider reactions to JFK’s assassination by White southerners and Los Angeles Jews:
    http://www.vdare.com/articles/fifty-years-ago-today-how-an-alabama-high-school-received-the-news-of-kennedy-s-assassinati
    http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/.premium-1.558952 Nov. 22, 1963 Jewish school in L.A.

  8. I SERIOUSLY DOUBT THAT MOST WHITES WOULD APPROVE OF BLACKS MOVING INTO THEIR NEIGHBORHOODS IN THE NORTH. DURING THAT PERIOD OF THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES, THE MOST WHITE FLIGHT TOOK PLACE IN OUR NORTHERN CITIES.

  9. There’s a limit on how useful these polls can be seeing that most people most of the time are hypocrites. Northern whites in the 1960s still lived in white neighborhoods still wanted a white majority America. What changed in the previous twenty years was that in the 1940s Northern whites were pro-white and proud by the 1960s they were pro-white and ashamed.

  10. It’s no wonder Lazarus and Zangwill were so enthusiastic about massive European immigration. Breed ethnic mongrels like White American Northerners and they’ll happily let the coloreds run loose. Andrew Fraser was so right about ethnic mongrelization:

    “Surely, homogenized “White” individuals who straddle and blur established ethno-religious boundaries should be objects of pity rather than models to be emulated. Are not such people detached, spiritually and genetically, from any really existing European race?

    Germans, Italians, and Englishmen: all can and should reproduce, each according to its own kind. Blending together different White racial groups in a quest to breed generic Europeans is to create a deracinated population of ethno-hermaphrodites.”

    http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/10/vanishing-anglo-saxons-jared-taylors-white-identity-and-the-crisis-we-face-part-1/

  11. Dan Poole

    One advantage of being a European mongrel is there’s no chance of our blood being mixed with injuns like so many of you slant eyed high cheekboned Southerners.

  12. Andrew Fraser was so right about ethnic mongrelization:

    Let’s assume he is correct. How does that help anything? The man’s stuck cursing the past; he’s immobilized by it. Follow in his footsteps and you’ll be immobilized too, left with little do but eek out whiter-than-thou ‘victories’ with internet nutters like ‘prussiancroat.’

    Poole: Breed ethnic mongrels like White American Northerners and they’ll happily let the coloreds run loose.

    But of course, as surely as night follows day. Who could possibly fault that logic?

    Pcroat: One advantage of being a European mongrel is there’s no chance of our blood being mixed with injuns like so many of you slant eyed high cheekboned Southerners.

    WNs. We promise you a society in which you’ll be scrutinized from head to toe, every day, for the rest of your life, for any hint of racial unworthiness, and be made to feel horrible about it.

    Way to go, feller. They’ll be signing up in droves.

  13. ‘no chance of our blood being mixed with injuns like so many of you slant eyed high cheekboned Southerners’

    Lower class whites, at least, did plenty of mixing with Indians, Marranos, Subsaharan Africans, etc., in the ‘Golden Circle’ slavery-based multiracial caste elitist culture. Melungeons are some of the diverse results.

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