As February’s Black History Month comes to a close, let’s remember that the line dividing good and evil has never run along the Mason-Dixon Line. In one of the books on our 2017 Books of the Year short list, Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure (Encounter), author Gene Dattel describes an incident in Philadelphia during or soon after the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The Rev. Absalom Jones was praying on his knees on the ground floor of St. George’s Church, near Constitution Hall. A white trustee pulled him up and said, “You must get up; you must not kneel here.” Jones, an African-American, was supposed to stay in the racially segregated balcony.

Dattel shows how for decade after decade Northerners displayed racism. In 1803 the Ohio Legislature passed “black laws” to keep African-Americans from coming into the state. In 1821 New York eliminated a property requirement for white voters while raising the requirement for black voters by 150 percent. In 1836 Michigan prohibited African-Americans from voting and said blacks are “a degraded caste of mankind.” In 1847, South Boston residents bragged that “not a single colored family” lived there. In 1853 the Illinois Legislature passed “An Act to Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into the State.” In 1857 three-fourths of whites in Connecticut voted against allowing blacks (2 percent of the population) to vote.

After the Civil War, a prime goal of Northerners was to keep freed slaves from heading their way. Until World War I, the North welcomed immigrants from Europe but not African-Americans from the South. That changed during and after World War I: Between 1916 and 1930 Southern blacks, 1.5 million of them, took the steel tracks north, but many were still unwelcome. When a black physician, Alexander Turner, moved into a white Detroit neighborhood in 1925, 5,000 whites surrounded his house. Some stoned him. A home purchase by another black doctor, Ossian Sweet, led to murder.

The move north often brought economic progress but moral regress. African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, exploring demoralization and high illegitimacy rates, wrote in The Negro Family in Chicago (1932) of missing “continuity and roots … fading memories of relatives and life in the south.” He wrote of a married mother who summarized “her family background” with this: “I ain’t got no history.”

In the 1950s and 1960s the desegregation of Southern schools received national attention. Dattel is faithful to history when he writes that the attempt “to portray the South as the nation’s exclusive racial scapegoat soothes Northern consciences but is misleading.” Sen. Abe Ribicoff, D-Conn., acknowledged in 1969 that “you too” rejoinders from the South were accurate: “The North is guilty of monumental hypocrisy in its treatment of the black man.”

BOOKMARKS

Reading Puritan literature from centuries ago is an acquired taste, and I admit to liking J.I. Packer’s elegant essay on John Owen more than Owen’s writing itself—but I do admire The Works of William Perkins, Volume 1 (Reformation Heritage, 2014). Perkins (1558-1602) knew the temptations of power and wrote that “temptations fetched on the right hand from honor, pleasure, and commodity, are the most dangerous and do soonest creep into the heart of man. … In these our days worldly hopes have drawn those from the sincerity of religion, whom outward violence could not move; prosperity is a slippery path, wherein a man does soon catch a fall, and therefore we must learn to be most watchful over our own hearts when we have fairest weather with the world.”

Glenn Frankel’s High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (Bloomsbury, 2017) is a well-researched and readily readable account of how a Jewish director, producer, and screenwriter created a great Protestant, individualistic Western. Unsurprisingly, chapters decrying the politics of 1952 make the book academically respectable, but they detract little from a parable of Here I Stand courage. —M.O.