Segregation

Segregation means the separation of the races by informal means such as custom and tradition, frequently upheld by threats of violence, or formal means through laws that forbid the mixing of the races in public facilities such as trains, buses, hotels, restrooms, restaurants, schools, and hospitals. When slavery was [Page 739]practiced in the United States, free blacks in both the North and the South found restaurants and hotels closed to them, and they were often excluded from first-class accommodations on trains and steamboats. Although these forms of segregation continued after the Civil War, during Reconstruction the complete segregation of the races was not mandated by law. The withdrawal of federal troops from the South following the election of 1876 allowed Southern states to restrict and eliminate voting rights of blacks by utilizing such devices as the poll tax and literacy tests. Once this was accomplished, the Southern states were able to pass laws segregating public accommodations. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld legal segregation on railroads in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

By the turn of the century Jim Crow laws mandating segregation and relegating black Americans to an inferior status proliferated across the South. The National Association for Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909 to fight against racism, used the courts to fight against segregation. The struggle against segregation was also aided by social forces such as the migration of many blacks to northern states where they could vote and influence the political process. During World War II, black Americans fought in segregated units but following the war, President Truman ordered the Armed Forces to integrate.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education reversed the earlier Plessey decision and declared that separate but equal was no longer the law. Massive resistance to school integration in the South led to the creation of White Citizens' Councils and increased violence against blacks. This resistance led to increased determination by blacks to defy segregation through sit-ins at lunch counters and freedom rides on buses. The demonstrations turned increasingly violent. In August 1963, over 200,000 Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to rally for the passage of federal legislation that would outlaw segregation in public accommodations. On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. It outlawed segregation in public accommodations such as restaurants, hotels, motels, public restrooms, railroads, bus lines, airplanes, and waiting rooms for public transportation. The end of legally mandated segregation did not mean the end of de facto segregation as residential segregation reinforced by white flight to the suburbs of the major cities continued. Even good faith compliance with the Brown decision did not end de facto segregated schools with those in the suburbs tending toward all white students and schools in the inner cities tending toward all black.

Governor George Wallace attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama, June 11, 1963. Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronts him.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-U9-9930-20.

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