Segregation

By: Raphael Jr. Cassimere, Susan B. Iwanisziw

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Segregation

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with the racial separation of African Americans in the United States. The first article provides a discussion of the topic until 1830, including its definition and philosophical and religious origins, while the second article discusses the events, customs and laws related to segregation from the antebellum era to Plessy v. Ferguson.]

Segregation in Early America

Although the North American practice of racial separation was seeded during the colonial era, only in the century following the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) did the segregation of African Americans, as it is understood today, become entrenched. Segregation refers to the restriction of access on the basis of race to public facilities such as churches, hotels, and streetcars or the provision of separate accommodations for blacks and whites in public institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons. Some of these measures were implemented before 1830, but only on a limited scale and only infrequently by legal action. During slavery, African Americans were routinely denied the freedoms of worship and movement, the opportunity for an education, and basic legal rights. The relative dearth of legal or public sanctions against black and white interaction, then, can be accounted for by the unequal opportunity of blacks in accessing public services or securing legal protections in the first place. Indeed, early colonial legislation was designed to separate both enslaved and free African Americans from European Americans who shared a similar economic or social status. These separatist measures fall into two categories: formal legal constraints and informal social constraints.

Formal and informal restrictions on racial intermixing in the colonial era were local and highly variable. The degree of separation that elite whites created between the races was contingent upon operant conditions in the local economy rather than upon any direct application of religious or philosophical objections to a racially integrated community. Attitudes hardened toward the close of the eighteenth century. Free blacks then numbered about 60,000, most of them concentrated between Massachusetts and North Carolina, and by 1800 they numbered over 100,000. Free blacks usually lived in the poorer sections of cities, often sharing neighborhoods and tenements with poor whites, although a prosperous and relatively autonomous African American middle class emerged in cities like Philadelphia.

Different residence patterns were imposed upon slaves, who numbered more than 1 million by 1800. Those working on southern plantations frequently lived among clusters of slaves at some distance from the slave owner; slaves working as domestics in the North or in southern cities tended to reside in the same house as the owner's family; and northern and southern slaves hired out as sailors, laborers, or artisans often mixed freely with whites. Whether slave or free, living in proximity to whites or not, African Americans became the object of considerable white prejudice, which was championed widely in religious and scientific discourse. Interpretations of the book of Genesis suggested that Africans were cursed as descendants of Noah's degenerate son Ham, and eighteenth-century European natural history and philosophy put forward by the likes of Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) in Systema naturae (1735), Georges Leclerc (Comte de Buffon) in Histoire naturelle (1749–1804), and Gotthold Lessing in Laokoon (1766) conditioned white readers to accept the notion of Africans' biological degeneracy. This putative degeneracy became the philosophical cornerstone of nineteenth-century segregation legislation.

Laws Promoting Racial Separation

Colonial Massachusetts, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Jersey, and New York all imposed penalties for partners in mixed-race marriages and fornication or for participants in cross-racial socialization. In its early phase, colonial legislation to prevent cross-racial sexuality or socialization between low-ranking whites and slaves focused on punishing and demeaning the white transgressors. Thus, Maryland's law of 1661, which continued in force until 1681, sanctioned the enslavement of white women who married black slaves and the enslavement of their children. Virginia's laws of 1662 and 1691 imposed fines for cross-racial sexual transgressions and deported white spouses in interracial marriages from the colony. By 1735 white women giving birth to mixed-race children in Virginia were fined and sentenced to a period of labor. The freedom granted to mixed-race children of white mothers was a strong incentive for slave owners to maintain the social and sexual divide between blacks and whites, for these free mixed-race children created problems in justifying freedom or slavery on the basis of racial identity. In the early years of slavery, blacks were not severely punished for transgressing these laws: the onus fell upon whites, who were held responsible for isolating themselves from the black population. Much of this early legislation was designed to conserve the assets of slave owners and limit black influence on white society.

Many local slave statutes underwent review and codification at the turn of the century: for example, South Carolina revised its code in 1690 and 1696, as did Virginia in 1705. Pennsylvania's 1726 code instituted the posting of bonds to defray the costs of public support for indigent manumitted slaves, the enforced servitude of free blacks considered lazy, and punishments for cross-racial sexual transgressions. At this point, the black partner involved in cross-racial cohabitation and marriage was subject to harsher penalties than the white partner: in the case of marriage, an African American spouse could be reenslaved for life. Generally, the slave codes insisted that slaves were to be treated as property rather than as human beings, denied community membership, and deprived of civil and personal freedoms, all of which mandated distinct legal and social differences between blacks and whites. Following the Revolution, African American rights were further abrogated: manumitted blacks were more often than before exiled from slave states, African American migration to certain free states was prohibited or subject to bond, and public facilities in northern and southern cities became segregated.

Formal segregation was introduced in northern and southern antebellum cities. Where significant numbers of African Americans began to demand services, whites implemented legal measures to keep the races separate. Thus, in New Orleans, which became a U.S. city in 1803 and where whites considered African Americans particularly insolent, theaters, prisons, hospitals, cemeteries, and streetcars were segregated. Whites were forbidden to attend black-owned dance halls, taverns, and, ultimately, even the famous quadroon balls. Protected by their superior social status, however, they flagrantly violated these restrictions. In Cincinnati, too, where African Americans had previously lived amicably among whites, the great influx of free blacks by 1826 led to a similar pattern of segregation.

Social Conditions Promoting Racial Separation

Between 1619 and 1830 racial segregation was not widely or strictly enforced. However, in the effort to maintain social control, whites had undermined black autonomy since the first importation of African laborers into the English colonies. Slave owners attempted to erase African tribal affiliations and to prevent the development of traditional kinship ties that led to viable African American families and communities. Nevertheless, by 1770 both enslaved and free African Americans had generated extended kinship ties and group loyalties and practiced a culture of their own, all of which served as bulwarks against arbitrary white power. However, while free black men often had been eligible to vote in the colonial era, only five northern states permitted a black vote after the ratification of the Constitution. The reduction of voting privileges prevented the emergence of a black political cadre capable of ameliorating the social and economic liabilities that endangered many African American communities and ensured a continued dependence on white tolerance.

African American communities could not, as a rule, choose to disassociate themselves from whites until the late eighteenth century, when opportunities for black affiliation and action became available. Perhaps the major impetus for a willed African American separatism came when blacks rejected their inferior status and segregated seating in white churches and founded their own religious institutions. In late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, for example, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen led the move to found, respectively, the first black Episcopal church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Again, although some schools accepted African American as well as European American students, when private schools (or the white clientele) refused to accept African American students, education was offered separately. Anthony Benezet, a Quaker living in Philadephia, taught black pupils at his home in the evenings and maintained that they were as capable as white children. John Chavis, a black teacher in North Carolina, was compelled to hold evening classes for black students who were not permitted to join his white day students. For the most part, education had to be provided by white volunteers or by members of the African American community: even the new public school systems of major cities such as Boston and New Orleans initially refused admission to black students.

Paradoxically, while free African Americans strove to build communities modeled on those of European Americans, abolitionists and legislators often promoted the migration or colonization of free blacks rather than sharing their neighborhoods and public facilities. Many whites believed that the removal of blacks to distant parts of North America, to the West Indies, or to Africa would prevent a future racial admixture detrimental to the white race and obviate the social difficulties expected to arise from attempts at racial integration. Several religious groups proposed transporting African Americans to Africa as Christian missionaries, but, ironically, only Paul Cuffe, a black Quaker from Massachusetts, achieved that goal, in 1811–1812 and 1815.

Over the course of some two hundred years white attitudes toward African Americans changed considerably. While blacks were merely servants when they first arrived in Virginia, blacks' rights as slaves or as free persons deteriorated incrementally until African Americans came to constitute a despised caste deprived of constitutional protections. The cycle of legislative and social history that created this caste prepared the ground for the formal segregation policies that passed into law in the Jim Crow statutes of the late nineteenth century.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; Allen, Richard; Benezet, Anthony; Black Church; Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial; Black Migration; Chavis, John; Civil Rights; Crime and Punishment; Cuffe, Paul; Discrimination; Economic Life; Free African Americans before 1828; Integration; Jones, Absalom; Laws and Legislation; Marriage, Mixed; Race, Theories of; and Voting Rights.

Susan B. Iwanisziw

Segregation from the Antebellum Era to Plessy v. Ferguson

In 1896, one year after the death of the great civil rights leader Frederick Douglass, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that Louisiana's Separate Car Act, which required railroads operating in the state to provide “equal but separate” accommodations for white and black passengers, was constitutional. The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, denounced the law as a state-imposed badge of servitude on black Americans. The Plessy ruling, which established the basis for decades of legalized “separate but equal” segregation, represented the nation's failure to eliminate racial discrimination. The badge of servitude embodied the American racial policy that always treated blacks ambivalently, emphasizing physical differences more than similarities and designed not so much to physically separate as to emphasize social distinctions between inferiors and superiors. Neither static nor uniform, it varied from place to place and changed over time, always with the same goals—subjugation of blacks to whites.

Before the Civil War: Republicanism and Slavery Coexist

The American Revolution held the promise of change. Many whites pondered the contradictions between republican principles, which affirmed universal equality, and slavery, which negated freedom. Shortly thereafter, some states began emancipation. Yet they also legally proscribed that freedom to ensure that freedom did not mean equality. Often the newly “freed” blacks were, in the words of the historian Ira Berlin, little more than “slaves without masters.”

Some blacks self-segregated in response to white proscription. In 1792 Richard Allen led an exodus of blacks from the Methodist church in Philadelphia to protest the new segregated seating policy. Previously, the Methodists had taught that Christians, slaves and masters, shared fraternity in Christ. Eventually, principle and practice diverged, however, and free blacks could not interact with whites as equals. Allen undoubtedly preferred self-segregation with dignity to the humiliation of white-imposed exclusion. Soon the African Methodist Episcopal Church he created expanded to other parts of the country, filling both a spiritual void and educational needs. By 1800 it had presence in Baltimore, Charleston, and Richmond, but its antislavery stance and suspected involvement with slave revolts (Gabriel's in Virginia in 1800 and Denmark Vesey's in South Carolina in 1822) led to the church's expulsion from most southern communities by 1830.

This dual social order, separate and unequal, survived the nineteenth century. Manifested in different ways and buttressed by custom and law, segregation remained the standard in public interaction. Indeed, it was reinforced following Nat Turner's rampage in Southampton, Virginia, in August 1831. Although it lasted barely twenty-four hours, Turner's revolt provoked a response that endured into the next century. Unlike earlier slave conspiracies that unraveled before any whites were killed, the revolt in Southampton resulted in the death of sixty whites, including children. Panic-stricken whites reexamined old policies regarding both slaves and free blacks. Thereafter, southerners were virtually united in defending slavery, not as a necessary evil but as a positive good. Dissent to and criticism of slavery was no longer tolerated; any critic, black or white, suffered consequences. Southerners drove out local critics and banned outside abolitionists. For the next three decades there ensued a rash of new enforcement laws. All whites held police power over blacks, who had to carry passes or free papers and were subject to challenge by any white person. Poor whites especially loved to stop blacks, both for the reward and for the psychological satisfaction of asserting racial superiority. Blacks without proper papers faced severe punishment and could be whipped, imprisoned, or even sold into slavery. Cities such as Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans did not allow free black sailors to disembark; those found in town risked imprisonment or enslavement if their captains did not redeem them.

As society became more restrictive for free blacks, it liberalized rules for whites. Under the impulse of “Jacksonian democracy” several states enfranchised landless whites but also repealed black voting rights or imposed more stringent requirements on black voters. During the 1830s black men lost the right to vote in Tennessee (1834), North Carolina (1835), and Pennsylvania (1838). In 1821 New York enfranchised all white males but retained a property requirement for black male voters.

Southern black churches faced new restrictions and existed at the sufferance of whites. In antebellum New Orleans, for example, officials arrested the pastor of Saint James Church, a free black African Methodist Episcopal congregation, for allowing slaves to attend services. Finally, in 1850 the state revoked the church's permit to meet because authorities had observed both slaves and whites in attendance. State law permitted black churches to hold services only in the presence of a constable, whom the congregation had to pay three dollars an hour.

Northern blacks fared little better. Alexander Crummell, the first ordained African American Episcopal priest, could not attend New York's all-white public schools. A white mob destroyed the private abolitionist school he attended in Canaan, New Hampshire. After his ordination he could not secure a parish, black or white, anywhere in the United States. Most black churches, located in the poorest sections where black residents concentrated, served as hubs of their communities, offering support services such as schools, orphanages, and recreation. They were often targets for bigots—for example, in the 1863 draft riots in New York City, during which black institutions were burned and pillaged and hundreds of blacks were wounded or killed.

Black travelers in the South encountered discrimination on boats, streetcars, and trains, facing exclusion or assignment to inferior facilities, such as the “star” streetcar in New Orleans, so named because of the large black star painted on the side of the streetcars reserved for black passengers. Protests against this type of discrimination were frequent but to no avail. In New Orleans in 1833, for example, armed black men attacked a streetcar after the white driver refused to admit them, and in 1843 an angry free black New Orleanian shot at the conductor who refused to stop for him.

“Negro Expulsion from Railway Car, Philadelphia,” wood engraving by an unknown artist, from the Illustrated London News of 27 September 1856. It accompanied an article called “Sketches in the Free and Slave States of America.”

New York Public Library, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

view larger image

Northern black travelers suffered as well. In 1841 Frederick Douglass was forcibly evicted from an Eastern Railroad train for refusing to ride in the “colored” car. That same year, when Douglass was traveling with the white abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster, a conductor removed him from first-class quarters. Douglass received some small consolation when his white colleagues joined him in the Jim Crow section, where all had to endure rough seats in a cold, smelly car. In 1858 he and his fellow black abolitionist David Ruggles fought a conductor who tried to deny them first-class seats on a Pennsylvania railroad. In 1845, on his transatlantic voyage from Boston to London, he was denied quarters in a private cabin aboard the Cambria and had to endure an arduous crossing in the steerage section. On his return trip in 1847, even though he had paid for first-class quarters in advance, he was again denied his cabin on the Cambria. English public opinion forced the steamship company to change its policy and permit him to sail in first class—although he had to agree to dine alone and not mix with other passengers on deck. Even at that, angry proslavery passengers threatened to throw Douglass overboard if he made antislavery speeches.

Sojourner Truth, the famed black abolitionist, found Washington, D.C., a most inhospitable place for African Americans. During the Civil War she led a campaign against the all-white policy on the city's streetcars. Sometimes when accompanied by white women she was admitted; when she was alone, however, most drivers refused to stop for her. Several times she actually engaged in fisticuffs with white conductors who refused to allow her on their cars. Finally, in March 1865 Congress banned segregation on all streetcars in the District of Columbia.

A slave accompanying his master received better accommodations than free blacks, riding in the “white” train car and sharing the master's hotel room, though often sleeping on the floor and eating leftover food. The experiences of William and Ellen Craft, a slave couple, provide a dramatic illustration. Light enough to pass for white, Ellen disguised herself as a young gentleman accompanied by “his” body servant, her husband, William. They traveled by train and steamboat from Georgia to Philadelphia, securing decent accommodations along the way by means of another ruse: Ellen, who was illiterate, feigned a hand injury, which provided an acceptable excuse for not signing hotel registries.

Few blacks who traveled could afford first-class accommodations, and illiteracy compounded the problem of their poverty. All southern states prohibited educating slaves, and before the Civil War none provided education for free blacks. Moreover, even in the North some whites opposed black schools, private or public. For example, in 1835 a white mob destroyed an integrated school in New Hampshire. In 1850 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected Benjamin Roberts's plea for admission of his daughter into a white school. Five years later, however, the Massachusetts legislature ordered desegregation of all of the state's schools. While public schools were not integrated, a few private schools, such as Oberlin and Berea, admitted black students despite violent opposition.

Denied access to public schools, black Americans funded and supported private schools across the country. The historians John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., in their renownedFrom Slavery to Freedom, note that more than thirty-two thousand blacks were attending school by 1860. Some achieved great success. Alexander L. Twilight, for example, considered the first African American college graduate (from Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1823) was elected to the Vermont legislature in 1836. Two years later James McCune Smith, earlier denied entry into New York City's public schools, became the first black American to receive a medical degree, although from the University of Glasgow, in Scotland.

Segregation and subordination received judicial affirmation in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, ruled that no blacks, free or unfree, could be American citizens and that they had no rights which whites were bound to respect. It remained for the Civil War to produce change in the system. The war indeed brought changes for blacks, sometimes for the better, other times for worse. Free blacks became scapegoats for proslavery Northerners. Many whites, especially immigrants, believed emancipation would result in an inundation of black workers who would replace them. Some took out their racism and frustration against free blacks, sometimes killing them. For most blacks, however, the Civil War brought freedom. In 1862 Congress ended slavery in the District of Columbia and the western territories, and in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and invited blacks to join the military. Blacks fought bravely, even facing summary execution or enslavement if captured by Confederates. Military service won respect from some whites, but others resented any black in a uniform.

After the War: The Fight for Equality and Civil Rights Continues

The postwar period was a time of adjustment. Before the war many whites hated slavery but also hated blacks, and after the war many wished to maintain the old badge of servitude with only minimal changes. Some states amended the old slave codes and provided the freed slaves with minimal rights, in some cases little more than prohibition against their being again bought and sold. Louisiana's 1865 Agricultural Laborers' Code typified the many new laws that required former slaves to sign labor contracts with their old masters or risk being charged with vagrancy. Freedmen would be paid but could not leave home without a pass and were subjected to fines for unexcused absences, theft, or damage to property. No state conferred social or political rights. Many communities excluded all blacks except domestic servants from living in town and established curfews for weekend visits. Before 1868 no southern state except Louisiana provided funds for educating its former slaves.

Congress approved three new amendments: the Thirteenth, which banned slavery; the Fourteenth, which gave freedmen citizenship rights and prohibited racial discrimination; and the Fifteenth, which was designed to guarantee voting rights. From 1867 to 1875 blacks achieved modest political success, electing two U.S. senators, both from Mississippi: Hiram Revels (1870–1871) and Blanche K. Bruce (1875–1881). In addition, thousands of other black officials were elected to office, including congressmen, state legislators, lieutenant governors in Louisiana and South Carolina, aldermen, sheriffs, and school board members. For thirty-five days the black former Union military officer P. B. S. Pinchback was Louisiana's acting governor. Biracial coalitions passed laws to fund public education, albeit mostly segregated schools except in Louisiana and South Carolina, and even there only briefly in the face of fierce white opposition to school integration.

After the war most northern communities offered public education to blacks, but usually in all-black schools. Northern missionaries opened schools such as Fisk in Nashville and Straight in New Orleans to further the education of former slaves. Some white universities, including West Point, began admitting black students. Although the admissions were opposed by the military, the academy was forced to desegregate because black congressmen could nominate candidates. James W. Smith, the academy's first black cadet, was continually shunned and taunted by his white colleagues. The suspicious circumstances under which he left caused many to believe that he was wrongfully expelled in 1874 before receiving his commission. To correct this wrong, President Bill Clinton approved Smith's posthumous commissioning in 1997. Negative treatment of black cadets continued well into the twentieth century.

Black Americans faced overt racism in exercising political and civil rights. Between 1868 and 1875, paramilitary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the White League killed or wounded thousands of blacks across the South, necessitating passage of the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. It authorized the president to declare martial law and send in federal troops to suppress lawlessness. President Ulysses S. Grant achieved moderate success in curtailing Klan activities in the Carolinas, but adverse rulings from the Supreme Court permitted a violent resurgence. For example, in 1876 the Court ruled in U.S. v. Cruikshank that Congress had no power to protect civil rights within states. That same court weakened the effectiveness of the Fifteenth Amendment, ruling that the amendment did not guarantee voting rights for blacks but merely prohibited states from using race or color as a voter disqualification. Thereafter, southern states cleverly used poll taxes and tests for literacy and “good morals” to prevent blacks from voting without actually using race as a disqualification.

Instead of protecting the rights of the freedmen, the Court narrowly interpreted the new laws. For example, in 1876 in Hall v. DeCuir it voided Louisiana's antisegregation public accommodations law because the state supposedly had intruded on Congress's plenary power to regulate interstate travel. In 1883 the Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Congress, largely at the urging of its black members who faced discrimination traveling to and from the District of Columbia, not only banned discrimination in public accommodations but also authorized victims to seek punitive damages. Because the federal government was derelict in enforcement, the burden of desegregation fell on black patrons, such as the future crusader against lynching Ida Wells. In 1884 Wells had won $500 in damages against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in Tennessee circuit courts but lost the award when it was reversed by the Tennessee high court in 1887. Apparently, Wells fell victim to the 1883 Supreme Court ruling in the Civil Rights Cases, whereby the high court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Court ruled that Congress had exceeded its authority under the Fourteenth Amendment to ban discrimination based on race or color by private individuals. The majority ruled that the amendment prevented states, but not individuals, from discriminating. Hence, private discrimination, free from state coercion, was legal even if directed against persons of color. Justice Harlan—ironically a former slaveholder and the court's lone southerner—issued the only dissent, similar to his dissent in Plessy thirteen years later.

It did not take the states long to find other loopholes, and in 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, ostensibly designed to ensure equal accommodations for both races on railroads, but in separate cars (with a notable exception—black nannies could accompany white children). A biracial, though largely black, Citizens' Committee in Louisiana vigorously resisted the law, but on 18 May 1896 the Court sustained segregation, which remained official policy until reversed almost fifty-eight years to the day later, on 17 May 1954, in a unanimous ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Hence, Civil War amendments notwithstanding, segregation was still as entrenched at the end of the nineteenth century as it had been a century earlier, and the descendants of slaves faced almost as much discrimination as did their ancestors.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; American Revolution; Antislavery Movement; Black Abolitionists; Black Church; Black Politics; Cambria Incident; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Act of 1875; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Class; Constitution, U.S.; Crummell, Alexander; Discrimination; Douglass, Frederick; Dred Scott Case; Education; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Fifteenth Amendment; Foster, Abby Kelley; Fourteenth Amendment; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Freedmen; Grant, Ulysses S.; Immigrants; Integration; Jim Crow Car Laws; Laws and Legislation; Lincoln, Abraham; Lynching and Mob Violence; Military; Oberlin College; Pinchback, P. B. S.; Political Participation; Poverty; Progress; Proslavery Thought; Racism; Reconstruction; Reform; Religion; Religion and Slavery; Riots and Rebellions; Ruggles, David; Slave Resistance; Slavery; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Smith, James McCune; Supreme Court; Thirteenth Amendment; Truth, Sojourner; Turner, Nat; Union Army, African Americans in; Violence against African Americans; Voting Rights; Wells-Barnett, Ida; and Work.

Raphael Cassimere Jr.

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