Racial segregation in the United States

• 1. Antebellum Foundations And Early Resistance

  ›

  In 1832, Prudence Crandall admitted an African American girl to her all-white Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut. The public backlash was immediate and violent. A mob attacked the school, and Crandall was jailed for violating a Black Law that prohibited such integration. This event marked one of the earliest organized attempts to provide education to black people before the Civil War. Earlier efforts included the African Free School established in New York City during the 18th century. Richard Humphreys, Samuel Powers Emlen Jr, and Prudence Crandall worked together to establish schools for African Americans in the decades preceding the war. In 1835, an anti-abolitionist mob destroyed Noyes Academy, an integrated school in Canaan, New Hampshire founded by abolitionists in New England. These early struggles set the stage for the legal battles that would follow. The U.S. government also established Indian boarding schools where Native Americans were sent. Education during the period of slavery in the United States was limited. Efforts to establish schools for them were met with violent opposition from the public. The Roberts v. City of Boston case in 1849 allowed segregated schools under the Massachusetts Constitution. David Daggett, Yale Law School co-founder and mayor of New Haven, led the fight against schools for African Americans. He helped block plans for a college for African Americans in New Haven, Connecticut.

• 2. Reconstruction And The Rise Of Jim Crow

  ›

  Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which granted African Americans the right to vote through the Fifteenth Amendment ratified in 1870. Federal occupation in the South helped many black people elect their own political leaders. However, when federal troops were withdrawn in 1877, the Republican Party in the South splintered and lost support. Conservatives calling themselves Redeemers took control of all Southern states. By 1910, segregation was firmly established across the South and most of the border region. Only a small number of black leaders were allowed to vote across the Deep South. Disfranchisement of black people began in the 1890s. A backlash among white Republicans led to the rise of the lily-white movement to remove African Americans from leadership positions. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. This case sustained a Louisiana statute requiring railroad companies to provide separate but equal accommodations. From that point forward, everyone was supposed to receive the same public services with separate facilities for each race. In practice, the services reserved for African Americans were almost always of lower quality if they existed at all. Most African American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, allowed individual government department heads to impose segregation of federal workplaces in 1913. Jim Crow segregation began somewhat later, in the 1880s.

• 3. The Separate But Equal Doctrine

  ›

  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. The court ruled that segregation was constitutional as long as separate but equal facilities were provided. This doctrine remained the correct rule of law for nearly sixty years. Between 1899 and 1950, the Supreme Court held this principle either explicitly or by necessary implication in cases like Cumming v. Board of Education and Sweatt v. Painter. Toward the end of that period, the Court began to focus on whether the separate facilities were in fact equal. In Brown v. Board of Education in 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, taking 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. The repeal of separate but equal laws became a major focus of the civil rights movement. By 1967, the Loving v. Virginia decision overturned anti-miscegenation laws declared constitutional in 1883.

• 4. New Deal Redlining And Hypersegregation

  ›

  With the passing of the National Housing Act of 1934, the United States government began making low-interest mortgages available through the Federal Housing Administration. Black families were explicitly denied these loans despite being technically allowed. Eligibility was largely determined by redlining maps created by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. Any neighborhood with inharmonious racial groups would be marked red or yellow depending on the proportion of Black residents. The federal government required housing projects to be explicitly segregated to receive backing. Racially restrictive covenants banned White homeowners from reselling their house to any Black buyers. This effectively locked Black Americans out of the housing market. Many established African American communities were disrupted by interstate highways routed through their neighborhoods. To build these elevated highways, the government destroyed tens of thousands of single-family homes. Families were given pittances for their properties and forced into federally-funded housing called the projects. In its first few weeks of operation, Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the North were integrated. By July 1935, practically all CCC camps in the United States were segregated. Black workers were strictly limited in their assigned supervisory roles. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote a rebuttal to Senator Josiah Bailey in 1937 defending his stance on segregation.

• 5. Civil Rights Movement And Legal Desegregation

  ›

  On the 4th of December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to be moved to the back of a bus for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of defiance sparked the Montgomery bus boycott which lasted from 1955 to 1956. A federal court suit in Alabama, Browder v. Gayle, ruled Alabama's bus segregation laws illegal. The Supreme Court upheld this decision. In 1961, Congress of Racial Equality director James Farmer led Freedom Riders on Greyhound buses from Washington, D.C. toward New Orleans. In Anniston, Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan attacked the buses, setting one bus on fire. U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy urged restraint but later relented and ordered desegregation of buses and stations. On the 11th of September 1964, John Lennon announced The Beatles would not play to a segregated audience in Jacksonville, Florida. City officials relented following this announcement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Fair Housing Act of 1968 further dismantled legal barriers. By 1972, federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated modern standards of decency and ordered an end to unconstitutional conditions.

• 6. Military Service And Institutional Integration

  ›

  In World War I, blacks served in the United States Armed Forces in segregated units. The 369th Infantry Regiment distinguished themselves and were known as the Harlem Hellfighters. The U.S. military remained very segregated during World War II. The Army Air Corps and Marines had no blacks enlisted in their ranks. Before the war, the army had only five African American officers. No African American received the Medal of Honor during the war. Black soldiers were sometimes forced to give up their seats in trains to Nazi prisoners of war. World War II saw the first black military pilots in the U.S., the Tuskegee Airmen. Despite institutional policy of racially segregated training for enlisted members, officer candidate schools began integrating all candidates regardless of race in 1942. On the 26th of July 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 ending segregation in the United States Armed Forces. Pressure to end racial segregation grew among African Americans and progressives after World War II ended. A club central to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City, was a whites-only establishment with blacks allowed to perform but to a white audience.

• 7. Sports And Cultural Barriers

  ›

  In 1900, just four years after the Supreme Court separate but equal ruling, segregation was enforced in horse racing. Widespread segregation also existed in bicycle and automobile racing. In 1890, segregation lessened for African-American track and field athletes after northern universities agreed to integrate teams. In 1908, Jack Johnson became the first African American to win the World Heavyweight Title. His personal life made him very unpopular among many Caucasians throughout the world. In 1937, when Joe Louis defeated German boxer Max Schmeling, the general American public embraced an African American as World Heavyweight Champion. In 1946, the NFL color barrier permanently broke when the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. The Cleveland Browns hired Marion Motley and Bill Willis. In 1947, the baseball color line was broken when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. By the end of 1949, only fifteen states had no segregation laws in effect. Golf remained racially segregated until 1961. The Professional Golfers Association stated it was for members of the Caucasian race. Public swimming pools proved particularly contentious venues where issues of hygiene and class coalesced to create an environment where segregation was especially pronounced.