The North Shares in US Institutional Racism: The Duluth Lynchings of 1920

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/the-north-shares-in-us-institutional-racism-the-duluth-lynchings-of-1920

"The concept that the North of the United States is less racist than the South should be regarded as a relative judgment only. After all, racism afflicts the history of the United States and is institutionalized into its social hierarchy. The US was built on racist cruelty and barbarism - most notably in the near extermination of Native Americans by Whites and the in the ineffably gruesome and ignoble institution of slavery and all the horrors that accompanied it. 

As BuzzFlash has pointed out before, the North was hardly entirely abolitionist during the ante-bellum period. Many lucrative northern businesses - such as textiles and ship building - profited from the processing of cotton picked by slaves and from the illicit transport of slaves (many of whom died in what was known as the "middle passage") from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. Other industries in the North also prospered from slavery, including banks."