What were some of the main ways the struggle for equality was different in the North compared to the South?

A common belief about the Civil Rights Movement, which has been encouraged by some published recollections, is that black people were freer in the North. Though it is true that black Northerners did not typically face the mortal threats that existed in the South, were able to use the same public accommodations and services as whites, and generally allowed to vote without any obstruction, many black Northerners would not exactly have described their lives as "free" during the 1950s and 1960s.
In the South, black people lived under a legal system of segregation referred to as Jim Crow. This required black people to use separate public facilities and to attend separate schools. Blacks who were deemed "insubordinate" to whites—an accusation that could have been levied against any black person who looked a white person in the eye when speaking to them, or for a black man who did not cross the street when a white woman passed on a sidewalk—could be lynched or beaten.
However, black and white Southerners often lived in closer proximity to each other than black and white Northerners did. Segregation was not legal in the North, but it was a fact of life, especially in housing. Black and white people lived in separate neighborhoods and this de facto segregation was reinforced by discriminatory banking practices, such as redlining—a mortgaging practice in which housing loans were only provided to black people for homes in predominately black communities. In some predominately white, middle-class communities, real estate swindlers convinced white residents to leave and sell their homes cheaply due to the fear of black people moving in. This practice was the start of "white flight," or the movement of white people into distant suburbs or specially constructed communities, such as Levittown, which often barred non-whites and Jewish people from buying homes. The swindlers would then resell the property at a much higher price. Banks were complicit in this. Redlining set mortgage loans for black people at much higher rates than what would have been offered to white borrowers.
Unfair mortgage practices, based in racism, made it difficult for black people to own property—a key method of building wealth and capital in the United States. However, those few who could afford to buy a home were relatively fortunate. Many black people were poor and confined to ghettos in Northern cities. As part of his Great Society, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the construction of housing projects in major cities, such as New York and Chicago. However well-intended, the lower-income housing did not solve the problem of poverty. There was no employment in or near these communities, and traveling to work downtown or to distant suburbs could be a challenge. The housing projects became hotbeds of crime, particularly drug dealing, and despair, for many drug users tended to live in the housing projects.
Like Southerners, Black Northerners were vulnerable to poverty, police brutality, and inequalities in housing and education. Those in the North also lived in communities with poor sanitation and, in many cases, people who had migrated to the North felt that they had lost the sense of community and the connection to the soil that they had in the South. Though black people who moved to the North were, in some ways, safer than they had been in the South and able to find decent-paying work, their quality of life did not improve. In some ways, it had actually declined.