http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/endofsouth.html In Lassiter's lecture, "De Facto / De Jure Segregation: The Strange Career of a National Myth," he talked about the nature of segregation in the North and West in post-1945 America. Lassiter sought to show how segregation in the South --- enshrined as it was in the law --- and segregation in the North and West were simply different brands of the same evil. The "North" (which has come to mean anyplace outside the South) didn't adopt legal segregation, but neighborhoods and homes were nonetheless often as segregated as those in the South. Some excerpts:
Racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South represented segregation in law --- de jure. Racial discrimination in residential and education patterns in the North and West reflected segregation in fact, but not enforced by law --- de facto. . . .
Very few Americans today know that two months before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington, he tested an early version of the speech in downtown Detroit. . . . "We must come to see" "that de facto segregation in the North is no less injurious than actual segregation in the South. . . ."
The New York Times ran an expose in 1956 and it summarized the consensus that racism was a psychological problem located within the white liberal conscience --- following Gunnar Myrdal's indictment --- not a structural product of public policies. The Times said, "Many Negroes and some whites feel that resistance to real integration in private housing in the North is as stubbornly rooted as the resistance to integrated schooling in the South. The final solution to the problem of segregation in the North lies in the hearts and minds of people."
The courts in the early 1960s began to draw a clear constitutional distinction between illegal de jure segregation that resulted from deliberate state action and permissible de facto segregation that encompassed anything and everything else. The NAACP forced this issue with an orchestrated campaign against public school segregation in dozens of Northern and Western communities, part of what the organization called an "all-out attack against Jim Crow schools, Northern style."
I live in Texas, and I remember about twenty years ago they cleaned up a bunch of antiquated laws from the frontiers days that had not been enforced since the frontier days. Anyone who looked at the legal code would have said "Why the hell is it against the law for a man in Texas to carry a pair of pliers in his back pocket?" Well, that was so that he wouldn't cut through barbed wire and rustle some cattle. No one ever got around to unwriting the law even after it stopped being used, because people forget to unwrite laws. Until someone notices that they are an embarrassment and goes after a bunch of them.
A state law about segregation would not have been enforced because it was unConstitutional so people probably forgot about it. Nice try, though. If you want I can find studies about schools in Northern cities where the minorities kids are mostly in one set of schools and the rich/white kids attend another set because they live in different areas and school districts and the schools make no effort to integrate the schools even though in a city it would be easy to assign kids to different schools. I was bussed in Austin, Texas in the 1970s. I loved my integrated school. It was much more politically and culturally tolerant and diverse than the all-white suburban school I had attended before. It prepared kids for the real world.
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