North of Dixie

...I make no claim to scientific method...

...Indeed, he describes some of the differences between the sections: New York and other Northern states have state commissions against discrimination or fair employment practice commissions which have made progress in eliminating discrimination...

...nor would we be justified in leaving the South alone because wrong occurs elsewhere...

...In An Epitaph for Dixie Ash-more demonstrated that without "scientific" apparatus he could brilliantly dissect and portray the race problem in a social, economic and political context...

...Usually when one discusses discrimination in terms of indiscriminately spreading the blame around the aim is to exculpate the South or, at least, to make it feel better...

...Negro political power exerts economic and social leverage...

...Southern discrimination is hardly identical with that practiced elsewhere...

...Although it probably would be cruel and unusual punishment to suggest he undertake a job of such magnitude again, he showed in The Negro and the Schools that he could, on a par with the best academic students of society, turn out a detailed work of scholarship...

...But he deals only briefly with his subjects and one wonders, for example, what would have been his views on the difficult question of quotas in public housing (see Bernard Roshco's "The Integration Problem and Public Housing," NL, July 4...

...But while Harry Ashmore's book, The Other Side of Jordan, is devoted to the race problem in the North, his aim is not to cancel out Southern debits by Northern ones...

...The book is an expanded version of 12 articles published in April 1960, in the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers...

...Therefore a book on Northern discrimination, though treating a real problem, is presumptively suspect...

...Co-author, "A Citizen's Guide to Desegregation" ONE OF VICE PRESIDENT Nixon's oft repeated campaign remarks on race relations was that they are a problem for the North as well as the South, the East as well as the West...

...there is a well-to-do Northern Negro middle class to some extent integrated into the community at large...

...He "simply went and looked and listened in the places Negroes of all conditions live in our biggest city, and talked before and after these visitations with some of those, white and colored, in New York and elsewhere, who have had long experience with the urban problem...

...If either or both of these techniques had been applied to The Other Side of Jordan, it would have been a far more interesting and better book, even though, undoubtedly, it would have provoked disagreement from many quarters...

...Although he briefly mentions the question of New York City school integration in a pattern of residential segregation, his observations here would also have been a worthwhile contribution...

...It is, in the author's words, "unabashedly, journalism...

...He treats the separatist Muslim and nationalist movements which manifest the discontent caused by segregation, but which seek continued separation, not integration...

...It is a shame that the book is so spare...

...He discusses the paradoxes racial concentrations often produce—e.g., that political forces exert pressure to dissipate racial ghettos—but precisely these ghettos give rise to those political forces...

...As is, he presents primarily only an outline of many of the North's racial issues...