School Segregation

Racial Segregation

In the United States, “colored” students were legally prohibited from attending “white-only” schools during the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of prejudicial cultural beliefs regarding the social roles and rights of “colored” citizens and freed slaves. In 1896, the Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana, which had ruled that Homer Plessy, a legally identified “colored” man, could not ride in a train car reserved for “whites” only. This landmark ruling ushered in the Jim Crow era, which manifested itself most visibly in the construction of “separate but equal” public facilities, most notably schools. From the beginning, these segregated schools were racially distinct but never equal. “Colored” schools received far fewer resources than their “white” counterparts, and because schools serviced specific neighborhoods, a by-product of most students walking to school, their construction helped propel and maintain the racialized neighborhood segregation already underway in many urban, suburban, and rural communities.

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