Jim Crow was active intervention while modern segregation is conservative preservation of inherited arrangements

Evidence

Old segregationist racism, from post-Reconstruction to Brown (1954), thus was an activist segregation produced for the most part by an active intervention in politics, economics, law, and culture self-consciously designed to produce segregated city, town, and neighborhood spaces. To combat this activism, the Civil Rights Movement likewise found itself called to action in every dimension. Prompted by the tensions between political pressures at home and abroad, the period from post-World War II to the 1970s, by contrast, was one of tension and contradiction, promise and projection, expectation and elevation, denial and dashed hope. It was a period of desegregating commitment and the seeds of a resegregating mobilization. The logic of the old segregation supposedly was swept aside – only to be replaced by the whisper of the new, the subtle and silent, the informal and insidious, what I earlier characterized as “the born again.” This newly expressed segregation, the newly privatized segregation at the heart of what I am elaborating as the model of racial americanization, is one no longer activist (at least at home) but conservative, a segregation in the literal sense conservationist. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 390

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes activist segregation (deliberate policy) from conservationist segregation (preserving the status quo through inaction).
• XREF: connects to: Segregating a hearing room mirrors the Jim Crow bus seating regime — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 76