Racial segregation in the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Racial segregation in the United States was not an accident of history. It was a system, engineered and enforced across nearly every surface of daily life: the school a child attended, the water fountain they could drink from, the bus seat they were allowed to keep. The U.S. Armed Forces were formally segregated until 1948, with Black units separated from white units and most often commanded by white officers. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld segregation's constitutionality in 1896, in a ruling that would not be overturned in public schools for nearly sixty years. What made this system so durable? How did it reach into housing, sports, banking, and the library down the street? And what replaced it when the laws finally changed?

• 2. The Legal Architecture

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  In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people were not and could never be U.S. citizens, and that the Constitution offered them no protection. Congress struck back with the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade racial segregation in public accommodations, but the Supreme Court struck that law down in 1883. Then came Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld a Louisiana statute requiring railroad companies to provide separate carriages for white and Black passengers. The Court's doctrine of "separate but equal" would remain the law of the land for the next six decades, honored more in the breach than the observance.

  In practice, facilities reserved for African Americans were almost always inferior to those available to white people, when they existed at all. At Stuart Training School in Martin County, Florida, students read secondhand books discarded by the white school across town. They wore hand-me-down sports uniforms. Their parents built the school's basketball court and sidewalks without school board assistance. The board never even connected the electricity to the lights they installed.

  President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, permitted individual department heads to impose segregation across federal workplaces in 1913. By 1910, segregation was firmly established across the South and most of the border region, with only a small number of Black leaders permitted to vote anywhere in the Deep South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally superseded all state and local laws requiring segregation, but compliance came slowly, requiring years of litigation in lower courts to enforce.

• 3. Before the Civil War

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  In 1832, Prudence Crandall admitted an African American girl to her all-white Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut. The public response was immediate and hostile. Crandall converted the school into one serving only African American girls, and was jailed for violating a Black Law. Three years later, in 1835, an anti-abolitionist mob attacked and destroyed Noyes Academy, an integrated school in Canaan, New Hampshire, founded by New England abolitionists.

  Yale Law School co-founder David Daggett, who also served as a judge and mayor of New Haven, led the fight against schools for African Americans and personally helped block plans for a Black college in New Haven, Connecticut. The 1849 case Roberts v. City of Boston, decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, ruled that segregated schools were permissible under the Massachusetts Constitution. California passed a law prohibiting people it labeled as "Negroes, Mongolians and Indians" from attending public schools, and required at least ten minorities in a community before they could even petition for a segregated school of their own. California's superintendent of schools, Andrew Moulder, stated publicly that "the great mass of our citizens will not associate in terms of equality with these inferior races."

• 4. Jim Crow in the South

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  The Jim Crow system took its name from a stereotypical 1830s Black minstrel show character, and after the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democratic state governments institutionalized it in law. Florida's Constitution of 1885, for instance, mandated segregation directly. Separate facilities extended to schools, hospitals, hotels, bars, parks, telephone booths, and separate sections in libraries, cinemas, and restaurants, sometimes with separate ticket windows and counters. In 1939, Black people in Palm Beach, Florida, were not permitted on the streets after dark unless their employment required it.

  Segregated libraries operated throughout the South. The East Henry Street Carnegie Library in Savannah, Georgia, built by African Americans in 1914 with assistance from the Carnegie foundation, was one example of what Black communities constructed for themselves. Nine Tougaloo College students were arrested when they requested service from the all-white Jackson Public Library in Mississippi. The St. Helena Four, four teenagers, made multiple attempts to use the Auburn Regional Library in Greensburg, Louisiana, typically resulting in intimidation or arrest.

  In 1964, E. J. Josey, the first African American member of the American Library Association, introduced a resolution preventing ALA officers and staff from attending segregated state chapter meetings in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. That resolution led to the integration of those states' library systems within a few years.

• 5. Housing and the Federal Hand

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  The National Housing Act of 1934 established the Federal Housing Administration, which began offering low-interest mortgages to American families. Black families were explicitly denied those loans. Eligibility was largely determined by redlining maps produced by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which marked any neighborhood with what it called "inharmonious racial groups" in red or yellow. The FHA's own underwriting manual mandated this practice. For federally backed neighborhood building projects, explicit segregation was required.

  The federal government also required racially restrictive covenants, which banned white homeowners from selling to Black buyers, effectively locking Black Americans out of the housing market. By some estimates, ninety percent of housing projects built in the years after World War II were racially restricted by such covenants. Cities where their use was widespread included Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Louis. In the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled these covenants legally unenforceable, but residential patterns had already been set in most cities.

  To build the interstate highway system, the government destroyed tens of thousands of single-family homes, many of them in African American neighborhoods. Families were paid minimal sums for properties declared to be "in decline" and were forced into federally funded public housing. Birmingham's Interstate Highway system, for example, was designed in part to maintain racial boundaries established by the city's 1926 racial zoning law. As of 2015, patterns had shifted: Black majority minority suburbs such as Ferguson, Missouri, were supplanting the older model of Black inner cities surrounded by white suburbs, even as gentrification produced new white neighborhoods in historically Black inner cities such as Washington, D.C.

• 6. Anti-Miscegenation Laws

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  The first explicit anti-miscegenation law in what would become the United States was passed by the colonial Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage. By the late 1800s, 38 states had anti-miscegenation statutes. By 1924, interracial marriage was still banned in 29 states.

  While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his relationship with white actress Kim Novak. Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures, feared the relationship would damage the studio. Davis briefly married Black dancer Loray White in 1958, in part to protect himself from mob violence. Drunk at the wedding ceremony, Davis said to his best friend Arthur Silber Jr., "Why won't they let me live my life?" The couple never lived together and began divorce proceedings in September of that year.

  In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving and dragged them from bed for living together as an interracial couple. The statute they were charged under held that any white person who intermarried with a colored person, or vice versa, "shall be guilty of a felony" and face up to five years in prison. In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile defended his original ruling, stating that God had placed the races on separate continents and that their separation showed he did not intend the races to mix. The Supreme Court overturned such laws only in 1967, with its ruling in Loving v. Virginia.

• 7. Sports and the Color Line

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  In 1900, just four years after Plessy v. Ferguson, segregation was enforced in horse racing, a sport that had previously seen many African American jockeys win the Triple Crown and other major races. In 1904, Charles Follis became the first African American to play for a professional football team, the Shelby Blues. But in 1933, the NFL reversed its earlier limited integration policy and completely segregated the entire league. That barrier did not permanently break until 1946, when the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode and the Cleveland Browns hired Marion Motley and Bill Willis.

  In 1908, Jack Johnson became the first African American to win the World Heavyweight Title in boxing. His acknowledged relationships with white women made him deeply unpopular among many white Americans. In 1937, when Joe Louis defeated German boxer Max Schmeling, the broader American public found itself willing to embrace an African American as champion. In 1942, the basketball color barrier was removed when Bill Jones and three other Black players joined the Toledo Jim White Chevrolet NBL franchise and five Harlem Globetrotters joined the Chicago Studebakers. In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the baseball color line.

  Public swimming pools were particularly contentious. As desegregation efforts intensified through the 1940s to the late 1960s, many municipalities closed their pools rather than integrate them. The lasting consequence was a racial gap in swimming ability, and the development of a racial stereotype that people of color could not swim for reasons of physicality. The Professional Golfers Association maintained a bylaw restricting membership to "members of the Caucasian race" until 1961, when the restriction was lifted and the Black players' United Golf Association Tour ceased operations.

• 8. The Persistence of Division

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  A 1988 study by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton identified five dimensions of residential segregation: evenness, clustering, exposure, centralization, and concentration. Data from the 2000 census found that 29 metropolitan areas displayed Black-white hypersegregation. The top ten most segregated cities were all in the Rust Belt, where populations had been declining for decades. A study cited by The Guardian, led by Stephen Menendian at the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than 80% of large American metropolitan areas were more racially segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990.

  The 2010 U.S. census found that 27.4% of all African Americans lived below the poverty line, the highest percentage of any ethnic group in the country. In Chicago by the 2002-2003 school year, 87 percent of public school enrollment was Black or Hispanic, with fewer than 10 percent of students being white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children in public schools were Black or Hispanic. Jonathan Kozol addressed this disparity in his 2005 book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

  Sociolinguist William Labov has argued that persistent residential segregation supports the use of African American English while also placing its speakers at a disadvantage in institutions that stigmatize it. The median household income of African Americans was found to be 62 percent of non-Hispanic whites, with figures of $27,910 versus $44,504. Massey and Denton proposed that the fundamental cause of poverty among African Americans is segregation itself, which has created poverty traps in Black urban communities that make it structurally difficult to leave the underclass. As recently as 2003, Dan Immergluck found that small businesses in Black neighborhoods still received fewer loans than comparable businesses elsewhere, even after accounting for factors such as business size, neighborhood income, and credit quality.