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Segregation in the United States
Legal or social practice in the United States of separating people on the basis of their race.Segregation by law, or de jure segregation, occurred when local, state, or national laws required racial separation, or where the laws explicitly allowed segregation. De jure segregation has been prohibited in the United States since the mid-1960s. De facto segregation, or segregation in fact, occurs when social practices, political acts, economic circumstances, or public policy result in the separation of people by race or ethnicity even though no laws require or authorize their separation. De facto segregation has continued even when state and federal civil rights laws have explicitly prohibited racial segregation.Segregation by law in the United States dates from the founding of the nation and was particularly widespread in the South for about eighty years, from the 1870s until the courts and the Congress of the United States prohibited legally sanctioned segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of the twentieth century, de facto segregation remained a problem in many places in the United States. De facto segregation has resulted from residential housing patterns, economic factors, personal choice, “white flight” from central cities, and private and often illegal discrimination by homeowners, real estate agents, and lending institutions. The results are often segregated neighborhoods, and consequently segregated schools, recreational facilities, and other public and private institutions.Segregation by Law
Although de jure segregation in the United States is most commonly associated with the South, segregation could be found at one time or another in every section of the country. The nation's first legal challenge to segregated schools, Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), took place in Massachusetts. A black man named Benjamin F. Roberts sued to force the city of Boston to allow his daughter Sarah to attend the nearest elementary school, and not have to travel across town to a segregated school. Roberts lost his case, but blacks in Massachusetts won a substantial victory when the state legislature prohibited segregation in the public schools in 1855.The federal government from its inception, meanwhile, created policies that separated blacks from the mainstream of American society. Before the Civil War (1861–1865), blacks were not allowed to join state militias or the U.S. Army or Navy, and the federal government refused to give passports to free blacks. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court of the United States declared that blacks could never be citizens of the United States.At the beginning of the Civil War, the national government refused to allow blacks to fight in the U.S. Army. However, in 1862 the government allowed blacks to enlist in segregated units, led by white officers. By the end of the war, more than 200,000 blacks had served in the U.S. Army and Navy. After the war, the nation adopted three constitutional amendments directed against racial discrimination: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), ending slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), declaring blacks citizens of the United States and prohibiting state laws that denied any persons within their jurisdiction equal protection under the laws; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. After the Civil War, most Northern states also prohibited segregation. However, into the 1940s there were pockets of de jure segregation in a few Northern states.Segregation in the South.
After the Civil War, de jure segregation rapidly became the rule in the South. There had been little need for segregation before the war because about 95 percent of all blacks were subject to the racial restrictions of slavery. However, the small free black population in the prewar South had faced segregation or outright exclusion from schools, theaters, taverns, and other public places. Immediately after the war, Southern state legislatures, dominated by former Confederates, passed laws known as Black Codes that severely limited the rights of blacks. The codes were slightly different from state to state, but they usually contained limitations on black occupations and ownership of property, and vagrancy laws under which blacks could be forced to work for whites if they were considered unemployed. These codes effectively segregated blacks into the rural areas of the state where they were virtually forced to become farm workers. Laws were also passed that segregated schools, courts, and juries.In response to these laws, Congress in 1866, led by the Northern-dominated Republican Party, seized the initiative in remaking the South. Under Reconstruction, as this process was known, blacks gained the right to vote throughout the former Confederate states and were elected to political offices across the South. By 1868 integrated Southern legislatures had repealed most of the laws that blatantly discriminated against blacks. In 1875 Congress passed a new civil rights act, designed to prohibit segregation in public facilities and accommodations, such as theaters, hotels, and restaurants.By 1877, however, the Democratic Party had regained control of the Southern states, ending Reconstruction. The strides that blacks had made—holding political offices, having the right to vote, and participating as equal members of society—were reversed, and the South gradually reimposed racially discriminatory laws. These laws achieved two main goals—disenfranchisement and segregation. In order to take away black political power gained during Reconstruction, the Democratic Party in the South began to disenfranchise blacks (prevent them from voting). There were a variety of methods to stop blacks from voting, including poll taxes, fees that all voters were required to pay and that were too expensive for most blacks; and literacy tests, which required that voters be able to read to vote. Since schooling for blacks had been virtually nonexistent before the Civil War and remained poor after the war, most black adults were illiterate. Literacy tests were often unequally administered, with black voters tested on arcane materials while semiliterate whites were asked only to read their name or some other simple text. The Democrats also began to create a segregated society that separated blacks and whites in almost every sphere of life. They passed laws that created separate schools and separate public facilities.In addition, the Supreme Court turned its back on racial equality. In The Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Court declared that Congress had no power to prevent private acts of discrimination. Writing for the Court, Justice Joseph Bradley declared: “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation … there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected.” Rather than being the “special favorites” of the law, however, blacks were increasingly the special targets of laws that required discrimination and segregation.The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld the constitutionality of separate railroad cars for blacks and whites. Speaking for the Court, Justice Henry Billings Brown argued that as long as the separate facilities for each race were “equal,” they were permitted under the Constitution. In dissent Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Southerner and former slave owner, argued that the “Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Justice Harlan pointed out that segregation created a psychological sense of superiority among whites while harming blacks.After 1900 Southern legislators carried segregation to extremes, solidifying what was known as the Jim Crow system of racial separation. A 1914 Louisiana statute required separate entrances at circuses for blacks and whites; a 1915 Oklahoma law segregated telephone booths; a 1920 Mississippi law made it a crime to advocate or publish “arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes.” Kentucky not only required separate schools, but also provided that no textbook issued to a black would “ever be reissued or redistributed to a white school child” or vice versa. Similarly, Florida required that schoolbooks for blacks be stored separately from those for whites. All Southern states prohibited interracial marriages.As the United States entered World War II in 1941, the South was a fully segregated society. Every school, restaurant, hotel, train car, waiting room, elevator, public bathroom, college, hospital, cemetery, swimming pool, drinking fountain, prison, and church was either for whites or blacks but never for both. In courtrooms blacks swore on one Bible and whites on another. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Southerners were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated schools, and buried in segregated graveyards.Violence and Segregation.
Throughout the South, segregation had the support of the legal system and the police. Beyond the law, however, there was always the threat of terrorist violence against blacks who attempted to challenge or even question the established order. During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and other terrorist organizations murdered thousands of blacks and some whites in order to prevent them from voting and participating in public life.With the demise of Reconstruction in 1877, there was an increase in racial violence as white Southerners tried to reclaim local and state governments and reestablish white domination over blacks. One of the main forms of violence was Lynching, when mobs would hang or otherwise execute blacks or others who were presumed to have committed crimes. Between 1884 and 1920 white mobs lynched more than 3,000 blacks in the South. Many were alleged criminals, but blacks were also lynched for any violation of the code of Southern race relations such as talking to a white woman, attempting to vote, or seeming to make trouble.Opposition before World War II
Violence and the power of state governments made resistance to segregation difficult. Nevertheless, blacks fought segregation at the ballot box, in the courtrooms, and through organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909. After the Supreme Court decision in The Civil Rights Cases in 1883, blacks throughout the nation held public meetings to discuss and protest the decision, and they organized the Brotherhood of Liberty to plan legal and political action against segregation. The brotherhood commissioned the publication, in 1889, of the first important legal analysis of segregation, in Justice and Jurisprudence: An Inquiry Concerning the Constitutional Limitations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, a volume of more than 500 pages.In 1905 a number of black activists, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, the first black to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard University, met in Niagara Falls to plan strategies to fight for racial equality. By 1909 the Niagara Movement, as the group called itself, led to the formation of the NAACP, a racially integrated organization dedicated to fighting segregation and inequality. Almost immediately, the NAACP began to challenge segregation in the courts. Before World War II started in 1939, there were a few significant victories in the Supreme Court. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Court declared unconstitutional a Louisville, Kentucky, law that required that blacks and whites live in certain sections of the city. In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Supreme Court also ruled that Missouri had to open its state-supported law school to blacks, unless it was prepared to build a separate law school for them.Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement
During and after World War II, challenges to segregation became more common and more successful. Three major factors accounted for this: the Great Migration; the changing nature of American politics; and the social and cultural changes connected to the war itself.The Great Migration.
From World War I (1914–1918) through the 1950s, a vast number of blacks migrated from the Southern states to the Northern and Western ones for a number of reasons, including better jobs and schools and a less racist environment. During this time the black population in both the North and South became increasingly urbanized as well. The movement to the cities concentrated blacks in specific neighborhoods, often giving them enough voting power to elect local public officials. Blacks in the North did not face legal barriers to voting, and thus actively participated in the political process. Not surprisingly, white Northern politicians with large black constituencies began to oppose segregation and to support civil rights.The Great Migration introduced millions of blacks to a world in which formal segregation did not exist and basic facilities, like transportation, restaurants, and public bathrooms, were open to all people. However, the North was not without racism. Blacks could not move to certain neighborhoods, were denied access to many jobs, and were informally segregated. Certain Labor Unions, particularly in the skilled building trades, excluded blacks. But, despite de facto segregation and exclusion by individuals, unions, and employers, blacks who moved to the North were able to live without the degrading oppression of day-to-day segregation. They were thus better able to oppose legalized segregation in the South.Changes in American Politics.
While the Great Migration changed how black Americans lived, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the New Deal, the federal government's response to the Depression, altered American politics by setting a precedent for government activism. The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed a new role of intervening in society to ensure jobs, justice, and the prosperity of the American people, who were severely affected by the economic hardships of the Depression. The president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, made clear her hatred for segregation as well. Her most important attack on segregation came in 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow the black opera singer Marian Anderson to give a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR, while the secretary of the interior, Harold L. Ickes, invited Anderson to give an Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This symbolic gesture set a new tone in Washington, one that indicated that the national administration no longer condoned segregation.By the eve of World War II, black voters regularly elected officials in a number of Northern states, as well as in Kentucky and West Virginia. These newly elected officials actively fought against segregation and racism, although not always successfully. By this time a majority of the members of Congress favored an antilynching bill, but these legislators were never able to overcome Southern filibusters (stalling tactics) in the Senate.Social and Cultural Changes.
World War II was a final impetus to a reinvigorated Civil Rights Movement. The struggle against Nazism forced some Americans to reconsider the legitimacy of racism in the United States. The death of six million Jews in the Holocaust, murdered merely because of their ethnicity, led some Americans to realize that racism could be a threat to democracy itself. Blacks also served in the military in unprecedented numbers. By the end of the war, many blacks had served with whites in integrated units.Finally, the postwar world forced the national government to face, for the first time, the threat that segregation posed to international relations. After the war, many colonies in Asia and Africa gained their independence from European domination. At the same time, the Cold War struggle with the Communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) forced the United States to court the goodwill of these nations. Segregation undermined the nation's ability to negotiate with these new nations while giving the USSR ammunition in its propaganda war against the United States. Leaders of the American foreign policy establishment urged an end to segregation at home as a way of fighting Communism abroad.Civil Rights Movement
After the war, the push to end segregation began in earnest, led by NAACP lawyers, veterans, and social activists. Ironically, the first victory came not from lawyers or activists, but from an agreement between a black athlete and a white businessman.Social Challenges to Segregation.
Since the 1880s major league baseball had banned black players. Because of this, black athletes played in the segregated Negro Leagues. That practice came to an end in 1945 when Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Jackie Robinson, who two years later entered the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers. During World War II Robinson, a U.S. Army officer, was acquitted in a court-martial for challenging illegal segregation on an army base. Robinson, a brilliant athlete, and many of the black players who followed him—including Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron—became stars to white and black fans alike. If the national pastime could be integrated, it seemed only a matter of time before the nation's schools, playgrounds, buses, and restaurants could also be integrated.Legal Challenges to Segregation.
Starting in the 1930s, a group of black attorneys began fighting segregation through the courts. They were led by Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice dean of the law school at Howard University, and his student Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the first black member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Joining them were other Howard graduates, including Spottswood William Robinson III and Oliver W. Hill. In Hollins v. Oklahoma (1935), Houston successfully challenged the exclusion of blacks from juries. In 1939 the NAACP created a separate nonprofit organization called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to bring cases that continually challenged segregation and racial discrimination.After 1942 legal challenges to segregation were more successful; by that year, Franklin Roosevelt's appointments had radically remade the Supreme Court. Between 1946 and 1950, the Court struck down segregation in interstate railroad trains, state-sponsored law schools, and other graduate schools. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the court ordered the University of Texas to integrate its law school.In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court declared that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” This decision, which was the foundation for School Desegregation across the United States, finally tipped the scales against segregation of all kinds. After Brown, the court gradually struck down all remaining forms of segregation. In Gayle v. Browder (1956), the Supreme Court silently overturned the Plessy precedent by holding that segregation was unconstitutional on public buses. This case grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began when civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the court struck down laws banning interracial marriage. By 1968 all forms of de jure segregation had been declared unconstitutional.Political Challenges to Segregation.
During the 1960s demonstrators in the Civil Rights Movement protested segregation throughout the South and in many Northern cities. The protesters held rallies, staged Sit-Ins, boycotted segregated businesses, worked to register black voters, and marched to try to end Southern segregation, and they met with often violent resistance from white Southerners. Organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were active throughout the South in rallying people to challenge segregation.
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Wallace: “Segregation Now!” George Wallace, the four-time governor of Alabama vows "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his 1962 inaugural speech.
