Racial segregation in the United States was the legally and/or socially enforced separation of black people from white people, as well as the de facto separation of other ethnic minorities from majority communities.C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd ed. 1947). Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation were, and in some ways are still, systematically separated in the United States on the basis of racial categorizations. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, racial segregation had other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage (enforced by anti-miscegenation laws) and the separation of roles within institutions. For example, the U.S. Armed Forces were formally segregated until 1948, as black units were separated from white units but were still typically led by white officers.Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality (2008)
Laws Pass Court In the 1857 Dred Scott case (Dred Scott v. Sandford,) the U.S. Supreme Court found that Black people were not and could never be U.S. citizens and that the U.S. Constitution and civil rights did not apply to them. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 in the Civil Rights Cases. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), so long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided, a requirement that was rarely met. The doctrine's applicability to public schools was unanimously overturned in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the following years, the court further ruled against racial segregation in several landmark cases including Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), which helped bring an end to the Jim Crow laws.
Segregation was enforced across the U.S. for much of its history. Racial segregation follows two forms, de jure and de facto. De jure segregation mandated the separation of races by law, and was the form imposed by U.S. states in slave codes before the Civil War and by Black Codes and Jim Crow laws following the war, primarily in the Southern United States. De jure segregation was outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.Judy L. Hasday, The Civil Rights Act of 1964: An End to Racial Segregation (2007). De facto segregation is that which exists without sanction of the law. De facto segregation continues today in such closely related areas as residential segregation and school segregation because of both contemporary behavior and the historical legacy of de jure segregation.
Antebellum era Schools were segregated in the U.S., and educational opportunities for black people were restricted. Efforts to establish schools for them were met with violent opposition from the public. The U.S. government established Indian boarding schools where Native Americans were sent.
The African Free School was established in New York City in the 18th century. Education during the period of slavery in the United States was limited. Richard Humphreys, Samuel Powers Emlen Jr, and Prudence Crandall established schools for African Americans in the decades preceding the Civil War.
In 1832, Prudence Crandall admitted an African American girl to her all-white Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, resulting in public backlash and protests. She converted the boarding school to one for only African American girls, but Crandall was jailed for her efforts for violating a Black Law. In 1835, an anti-abolitionist mob attacked and destroyed Noyes Academy, an integrated school in Canaan, New Hampshire founded by abolitionists in New England. In the 1849 case Roberts v. City of Boston, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that segregated schools were allowed under the Constitution of Massachusetts. Emlen Institution was a boarding school for African American and Native American orphans in Ohio and then Pennsylvania. Richard Humphreys bequeathed money to establish the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Yale Law School co-founder, judge, and mayor of New Haven David Daggett was a leader in the fight against schools for African Americans and helped block plans for a college for African Americans in New Haven, Connecticut.
Civil rights after the Civil War
Black schools were established by some religious groups and philanthropists to educate African Americans. Oberlin Academy was one of the early schools to integrate. Lowell High School also accepted African American students.
California passed a law prohibiting "Negroes, Mongolians and Indians" from attending public schools. It took ten or more minorities in a community to petition for a segregated school or these groups were denied access to public education. The state's superintendent of schools, Andrew Moulder, stated: "The great mass of our citizens will not associate in terms of equality with these inferior races, nor will they consent that their children do so."
In Colorado housing and school segregation lasted into the 1960s.
In 1867, Portland, Oregon prevented a Black student from attending its public elementary schools and instead established a separate segregated school when it was sued. Portland's public schools were integrated in 1872.
Reconstruction
Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870, granting African Americans the right to vote, and it also enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbidding racial segregation in accommodations. Federal occupation in the South helped allow many black people to vote and elect their own political leaders. The Reconstruction amendments asserted the supremacy of the national state and they also asserted that everyone within it was formally equal under the law. However, it did not prohibit segregation in schools.
When the Republicans came to power in the Southern states after 1867, they created the first system of taxpayer-funded public schools. Southern black people wanted public schools for their children, but they did not demand racially integrated schools. Almost all the new public schools were segregated, apart from a few in New Orleans. After the Republicans lost power in the mid-1870s, Southern Democrats retained the public school systems but sharply cut their funding.
Almost all private academies and colleges in the South were strictly segregated by race.Berea College in Kentucky was the main exception until state law in 1904 forced its segregation. The American Missionary Association supported the development and establishment of several historically black colleges including Fisk University and Shaw University. In this period, a handful of northern colleges accepted black students. Northern denominations and especially their missionary associations established private schools across the South to provide secondary education. They provided a small amount of collegiate work. Tuition was minimal, so churches financially supported the colleges and also subsidized the pay of some teachers. In 1900, churches—mostly based in the North—operated 247 schools for black people across the South, with a budget of about $1 million. They employed 1600 teachers and taught 46,000 students. Alt URLJoe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (1986). Prominent schools included Howard University, a private, federally chartered institution based in Washington, D.C.; Fisk University in Nashville, Atlanta University, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and others.
By the early 1870s, the North lost interest in further reconstruction efforts, and, when federal troops were withdrawn in 1877, the Republican Party in the South splintered and lost support, leading to the conservatives (calling themselves "Redeemers") taking control of all the Southern states. 'Jim Crow' segregation began somewhat later, in the 1880s.C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd ed. 1974) Disfranchisement of black people began in the 1890s. Although the Republican Party had championed African-American rights during the Civil War and had become a platform for black political influence during Reconstruction, a backlash among white Republicans led to the rise of the lily-white movement to remove African Americans from leadership positions in the party and to incite riots to divide the party, with the ultimate goal of eliminating black influence. By 1910, segregation was firmly established across the South and most of the border region, and only a small number of black leaders were allowed to vote across the Deep South.
Jim Crow era
The legitimacy of laws requiring segregation of black people was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. The Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute that required railroad companies to provide "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black passengers and prohibited white people and black people from using railroad cars that were not assigned to their race.Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 540 (1896) (quoting the Louisiana statute). From Findlaw. Retrieved on December 30, 2012.
Plessy thus allowed segregation, which became standard throughout the southern United States, and represented the institutionalization of the Jim Crow period. Everyone was supposed to receive the same public services (schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.), but with separate facilities for each race. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African Americans were almost always of lower quality than those reserved for white people, if they existed at all; for example, most African American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools. Segregation was not mandated by law in the Northern states, but a de facto system grew for schools, in which nearly all black students attended schools that were nearly all-black. In the South, white schools had only white pupils and teachers, while black schools had only black teachers and black students.
President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, allowed individual government department heads impose segregation of federal workplaces in 1913.
Some streetcar companies did not segregate voluntarily. It took 15 years for the government to break down their resistance.
On at least six occasions over nearly 60 years, the Supreme Court held, either explicitly or by necessary implication, that the "separate but equal" rule announced in Plessy was the correct rule of law,Cumming v. Board of Education, 175 U.S. 528 (1899); Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908); Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927); Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938); Sipuel v. Board of Regents, 332 U.S. 631 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950) although, toward the end of that period, the Court began to focus on whether the separate facilities were in fact equal. The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a major focus of the civil rights movement. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for black people and white people at the state level. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 superseded all state and local laws requiring segregation. Compliance with the new law came slowly, and it took years with many cases in lower courts to enforce it.
In parts of the United States, especially in the South, signs were used to indicate where African Americans could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat."Barack Obama legacy: Did he improve US race relations?". BBC. Retrieved June 5, 2020
New Deal era