Segregation

Segregation is the policy of imposing social separation of races, especially as practiced against nonwhites in a white-dominated society. South Africa's fifty-year policy of apartheid, which finally ended in 1994, placed severe restrictions on its African, Indian, and mixed-race inhabitants, such as where they could live and work. In the United States, the pernicious practice of segregation was legally sanctioned after the Civil War (1861–65), particularly in the former Confederate states that had practiced slavery.

The framers of the Constitution in 1787 avoided addressing the fact of slavery despite the pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence (1776) that “all Men are created equal.” Segregation existed even in many non-slave-owning states. For example, in 1849 Benjamin F. Roberts, a black man, sued the city of Boston to allow his daughter to attend a closer elementary school rather than have to go to the school for blacks across town. Although he lost his case, in 1885 the Massachusetts legislature ended segregation in the state's public schools. After the Civil War, in addition to the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments set out to make all African Americans, whether free people or former slaves, equal citizens of the United States.

It was probably overly optimistic to expect that the once-legal institution of slavery would disappear overnight without engendering racial enmity on the part of the whites who had supported it and benefited from it. Even so, it is difficult today to understand how the Supreme Court, which had the power to declare repugnant laws and actions unconstitutional, could have consistently condoned practices such as the segregation of blacks and whites, which were obviously calculated to ensure second-class citizenship for African Americans in many parts of the country. The outright exclusion of black Americans from public [Page p421][Page p422]facilities was concentrated in the former slave states.

In a series of cases in 1883, known as the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court found that segregating “colored” from white customers in hotels, theaters, and railroads did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because such discrimination was between private individuals and was not instigated or assisted by state government. With its 8–1 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court put its imprimatur on segregation by upholding the principle that “separate but equal” facilities—from public schools and buses to brothels—did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

The United States was not alone in condoning racial discrimination. Before the United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), there was no well-established international agreement as to whether people of all races, ethnicity, and national origins, as well as both sexes, were entitled to equal treatment under national and international law. World War II had exposed to the world the horrors of concentration camps and the slavery of so-called inferior races in Europe and Asia by the Nazis and the Japanese, respectively. The resulting movement to establish an international norm of equality for all humans based on equal dignity and equal rights affected many nations, including the United States.

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