
Facilities and services such as
housing
Housing refers to a property containing one or more Shelter (building), shelter as a living space. Housing spaces are inhabited either by individuals or a collective group of people. Housing is also referred to as a human need and right to ...
,
healthcare
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...
,
education
Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...
,
employment
Employment is a relationship between two party (law), parties Regulation, regulating the provision of paid Labour (human activity), labour services. Usually based on a employment contract, contract, one party, the employer, which might be a cor ...
, and
transportation
Transport (in British English) or transportation (in American English) is the intentional Motion, movement of humans, animals, and cargo, goods from one location to another. Mode of transport, Modes of transport include aviation, air, land tr ...
have been systematically separated in the United States based on
racial categorizations. Notably, racial segregation in the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
was the legally and/or socially enforced separation of
African Americans
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa ...
from
whites
White is a racial classification of people generally used for those of predominantly European ancestry. It is also a skin color specifier, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, ethnicity and point of view.
De ...
, as well as the separation of other
ethnic minorities
The term "minority group" has different meanings, depending on the context. According to common usage, it can be defined simply as a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half of a population. Usually a minority g ...
from majority communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against
interracial marriage
Interracial marriage is a marriage involving spouses who belong to different "Race (classification of human beings), races" or Ethnic group#Ethnicity and race, racialized ethnicities.
In the past, such marriages were outlawed in the United Sta ...
(enforced with
anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage sometimes, also criminalizing sex between members of different races.
In the United Stat ...
), and the separation of roles within an institution. The
U.S. Armed Forces were
formally segregated until
1948
Events January
* January 1
** The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is inaugurated.
** The current Constitutions of Constitution of Italy, Italy and of Constitution of New Jersey, New Jersey (both later subject to amendment) ...
, as
black units were separated from white units but were still typically led by white officers.

In the 1857
Dred Scott
Dred Scott ( – September 17, 1858) was an enslaved African American man who, along with his wife, Harriet, unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the '' Dred Scott v. Sandford'' case ...
case (''
Dred Scott v. Sandford''), the
U.S. Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
found that Black people were not and could never be
U.S. citizens and that the
U.S. Constitution and civil rights did not apply to them. Congress passed the
Civil Rights Act of 1875
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, sometimes called the Enforcement Act or the Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction era in response to civil rights violations against African Americans. The bill was passed by the ...
, but it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 in the
Civil Rights Cases
The ''Civil Rights Cases'', 109 U.S. 3 (1883), were a group of five landmark cases in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not empower Congress to outlaw racial discrimination by ...
. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in ''
Plessy v. Ferguson'' (1896), so long as "
separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protectio ...
" facilities were provided, a requirement that was rarely met. The doctrine's applicability to public schools was unanimously overturned in ''
Brown v. Board of Education
''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the ...
'' (1954). In the following years, the court further ruled against racial segregation in several landmark cases including ''
Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States'' (1964), which helped bring an end to the
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were U.S. state, state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, "Jim Crow (character), Ji ...
.
Segregation was enforced across the U.S. for much of its history. Racial segregation follows two forms, ''
de jure
In law and government, ''de jure'' (; ; ) describes practices that are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms, regardless of whether the practice exists in reality. The phrase is often used in contrast with '' de facto'' ('from fa ...
and
de facto''. ''
De jure
In law and government, ''de jure'' (; ; ) describes practices that are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms, regardless of whether the practice exists in reality. The phrase is often used in contrast with '' de facto'' ('from fa ...
'' segregation mandated the separation of races by law, and was the form imposed by
U.S. states
In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its so ...
in
slave codes
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
Most slave codes were concerned with the rights and duties of free people in regards to ensla ...
before the
Civil War
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...
and by
Black Codes and
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were U.S. state, state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, "Jim Crow (character), Ji ...
following the war, primarily in the
Southern United States
The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, Dixieland, or simply the South) is List of regions of the United States, census regions defined by the United States Cens ...
. ''De jure'' segregation was outlawed by the
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and United States labor law, labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on Race (human categorization), race, Person of color, color, religion, sex, and nationa ...
, the
Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights move ...
, and the
Fair Housing Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 () is a Lists of landmark court decisions, landmark law in the United States signed into law by President of the United States, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots.
Titles ...
of 1968. ''
De facto'' segregation, or segregation "in fact", is that which exists without sanction of the law. ''De facto'' segregation continues today in such closely related areas as
residential segregation Residential segregation is a concept in urban sociology which refers to the voluntary or forced spatial separation of different socio-cultural, ethnic, or racial groups within residential areas. It is often associated with immigration, wealth ineq ...
and
school segregation because of both contemporary behavior and the historical legacy of ''de jure'' segregation.
Antebellum era
Schools were segregated in the U.S., and educational opportunities for Black people were restricted. Efforts to establish schools for them were met with violent opposition from the public. The U.S. government established
Indian boarding schools where Native Americans were sent.
The
African Free School was established in New York City in the 18th century.
Education during the slave period in the United States
During the era of slavery in the United States, chattel slavery in the United States, the proper education of enslaved African Americans (with exception made for religious instruction) was highly discouraged, and eventually made illegal in most ...
was limited.
Richard Humphreys,
Samuel Powers Emlen Jr, and
Prudence Crandall established schools for African Americans in the decades preceding the Civil War.
In 1832,
Prudence Crandall admitted an African American girl to her all-white
Canterbury Female Boarding School in
Canterbury, Connecticut, resulting in public backlash and protests. She converted the boarding school to one for only African American girls, but Crandall was jailed for her efforts for violating a
Black Law. In 1835, an anti-
abolitionist
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world.
The first country to fully outlaw slavery was Kingdom of France, France in 1315, but it was later used ...
mob attacked and destroyed
Noyes Academy, an integrated school in
Canaan, New Hampshire
Canaan is a town in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 3,794 at the 2020 census. It is the location of Mascoma State Forest. Canaan is home to the Cardigan Mountain School, the town's largest employer.
The main ...
founded by
abolitionists
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world.
The first country to fully outlaw slavery was France in 1315, but it was later used in its colonies. T ...
in
New England
New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the ...
. In the 1849 case ''
Roberts v. City of Boston'', the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) is the highest court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although the claim is disputed by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the SJC claims the distinction of being the oldest continuously fu ...
ruled that
segregated schools were allowed under the
Constitution of Massachusetts
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the fundamental governing document of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one of the 50 individual states that make up the United States of America. It consists of a preamble, declaration ...
.
Emlen Institution was a boarding school for African American and Native American orphans in Ohio and then Pennsylvania.
Richard Humphreys bequeathed money to establish the
Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Yale Law School co-founder, judge, and mayor of New Haven
David Daggett was a leader in the fight against schools for African Americans and helped block plans for a college for African Americans in New Haven, Connecticut.
Civil rights after the Civil War
Black schools were established by some religious groups and
philanthropists to educate African Americans.
Oberlin Academy was one of the early schools to integrate.
Lowell High School also accepted African American students.
California passed a law prohibiting "Negroes, Mongolians and Indians" from attending public schools.
It took ten or more minorities in a community to petition for a segregated school or these groups were denied access to public education. The state's superintendent of schools,
Andrew Moulder, stated: "The great mass of our citizens will not associate in terms of equality with these inferior races, nor will they consent that their children do so."
In Colorado
housing
Housing refers to a property containing one or more Shelter (building), shelter as a living space. Housing spaces are inhabited either by individuals or a collective group of people. Housing is also referred to as a human need and right to ...
and school segregation lasted into the 1960s.
In 1867, Portland, Oregon prevented a Black student from attending its public elementary schools and instead established a separate segregated school when it was sued. Portland's public schools were integrated in 1872.
Reconstruction
Congress passed the
Reconstruction Acts of 1867,
ratified
Ratification is a principal's legal confirmation of an act of its agent. In international law, ratification is the process by which a state declares its consent to be bound to a treaty. In the case of bilateral treaties, ratification is usuall ...
the
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fifteenth Amendment (Amendment XV) to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It wa ...
in 1870, granting African Americans the right to vote, and it also enacted the
Civil Rights Act of 1875
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, sometimes called the Enforcement Act or the Force Act, was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction era in response to civil rights violations against African Americans. The bill was passed by the ...
forbidding racial segregation in accommodations. Federal occupation in the South helped allow many black people to vote and elect their own political leaders. The
Reconstruction amendments
The , or the , are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870. The amendments were a part of the implementation of the Reconstruction of the American South which oc ...
asserted the supremacy of the national state and they also asserted that everyone within it was formally equal under the law. However, it did not prohibit segregation in schools.
When the
Republicans came to power in the Southern states after 1867, they created the first system of taxpayer-funded public schools. Southern black people wanted public schools for their children, but they did not demand racially integrated schools. Almost all the new public schools were segregated, apart from a few in
New Orleans
New Orleans (commonly known as NOLA or The Big Easy among other nicknames) is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 at the 2020 ...
. After the Republicans lost power in the mid-1870s,
Southern Democrats
Southern Democrats are members of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the Southern United States.
Before the American Civil War, Southern Democrats mostly believed in Jacksonian democracy. In the 19th century, they defended slavery in the ...
retained the public school systems but sharply cut their funding.
Almost all private academies and colleges in the South were strictly segregated by race. The
American Missionary Association
The American Missionary Association (AMA) was a Protestant-based abolitionist group founded on in Albany, New York. The main purpose of the organization was abolition of slavery, education of African Americans, promotion of racial equality, and ...
supported the development and establishment of several
historically black colleges including
Fisk University
Fisk University is a Private university, private Historically black colleges and universities, historically black Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1866 and its campus i ...
and
Shaw University
Shaw University is a private historically black university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded on December 1, 1865, Shaw University is the oldest HBCU to begin offering courses in the Southern United States. The school had its origin in the fo ...
. In this period, a handful of northern colleges accepted black students. Northern denominations and especially their missionary associations established private schools across the South to provide secondary education. They provided a small amount of collegiate work. Tuition was minimal, so churches financially supported the colleges and also subsidized the pay of some teachers. In 1900, churches—mostly based in the North—operated 247 schools for black people across the South, with a budget of about $1 million. They employed 1600 teachers and taught 46,000 students. Prominent schools included
Howard University
Howard University is a private, historically black, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and accredited by the Mid ...
, a private, federally chartered institution based in Washington, D.C.;
Fisk University
Fisk University is a Private university, private Historically black colleges and universities, historically black Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1866 and its campus i ...
in Nashville,
Atlanta University,
Hampton Institute in Virginia, and others.
By the early 1870s, the North lost interest in further reconstruction efforts, and, when federal troops were withdrawn in 1877, the
Republican Party in the South splintered and lost support, leading to the conservatives (calling themselves "
Redeemers
The Redeemers were a political coalition in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era of the United States, Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War. Redeemers were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party (Unite ...
") taking control of all the Southern states.
'Jim Crow' segregation began somewhat later, in the 1880s.
Disfranchisement
Disfranchisement, also disenfranchisement (which has become more common since 1982) or voter disqualification, is the restriction of suffrage (the right to vote) of a person or group of people, or a practice that has the effect of preventing someo ...
of black people began in the 1890s. Although the Republican Party had championed African-American rights during the Civil War and had become a platform for black political influence during Reconstruction, a backlash among white Republicans led to the rise of the
lily-white movement
The Lily-White Movement was an anti-black political movement within the Republican Party in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a response to the political and socioeconomic gains made by African-Americans follo ...
to remove African Americans from leadership positions in the party and to incite riots to divide the party, with the ultimate goal of eliminating black influence. By 1910, segregation was firmly established across the South and most of the border region, and only a small number of black leaders were allowed to vote across the
Deep South
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term is used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on Plantation complexes in the Southern United States, plant ...
.
Jim Crow era

The legitimacy of laws requiring segregation of black people was upheld by the
U.S. Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
in the 1896 case of ''
Plessy v. Ferguson'', 163 U.S. 537. The Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute that required railroad companies to provide "
separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protectio ...
" accommodations for white and black passengers and prohibited white people and black people from using railroad cars that were not assigned to their race.
''Plessy'' thus allowed segregation, which became standard throughout the
southern United States
The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, Dixieland, or simply the South) is List of regions of the United States, census regions defined by the United States Cens ...
, and represented the
institutionalization
In sociology, institutionalisation (or institutionalization) is the process of embedding some conception (for example a belief, norm, social role, particular value or mode of behavior) within an organization, social system, or society as a w ...
of the
Jim Crow
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, " Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. The last of the ...
period. Everyone was supposed to receive the same public services (schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.), but with separate facilities for each race. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African Americans were almost always of lower quality than those reserved for white people, if they existed at all; for example, most African American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools. Segregation was not mandated by law in the Northern states, but a ''de facto'' system grew for schools, in which nearly all black students attended schools that were nearly all-black. In the South, white schools had only white pupils and teachers, while black schools had only black teachers and black students.
President
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat to serve as president during the Prog ...
, a Southern Democrat, allowed individual government department heads impose segregation of federal workplaces in 1913.
Some
streetcar
A tram (also known as a streetcar or trolley in Canada and the United States) is an urban rail transit in which vehicles, whether individual railcars or multiple-unit trains, run on tramway tracks on urban public streets; some include s ...
companies did not segregate voluntarily. It took 15 years for the government to break down their resistance.
On at least six occasions over nearly 60 years, the Supreme Court held, either explicitly or by necessary implication, that the "separate but equal" rule announced in Plessy was the correct rule of law, although, toward the end of that period, the Court began to focus on whether the separate facilities were in fact equal. The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a major focus of the
civil rights movement. In ''
Brown v. Board of Education
''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the ...
'', 347 U.S. 483 (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
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and United States labor law, labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on Race (human categorization), race, Person of color, color, religion, sex, and nationa ...
superseded all state and local laws requiring segregation. Compliance with the new law came slowly, and it took 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.
New Deal era
With the passing of
National Housing Act of 1934
The National Act of 1934, , , also called the Better Housing Program, was part of the New Deal passed during the Great Depression in order to make housing and home mortgages more affordable. It created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA ...
, the United States government began to make low-interest mortgages available to families through the
Federal Housing Administration
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), also known as the Office of Housing within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a Independent agencies of the United States government, United States government agency founded by Pr ...
(FHA).
Black families were explicitly denied these loans. While technically legally allowed these loans, in practice they were barred. This was because eligibility for federally backed loans was largely determined by
redlining
Redlining is a Discrimination, discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of Race (human categorization), racial and Ethnic group, ethnic minorities. Redlining has been mos ...
maps created by the
Home Owners' Loan Corporation
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) was a government-sponsored corporation created as part of the New Deal. The corporation was established in 1933 by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation Act under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roo ...
(HOLC).
Any neighborhood with "inharmonious racial groups" would either be marked
red or yellow, depending on the proportion of Black residents.
This was explicitly stated within the FHA underwriting manual that the HOLC used as for its maps.
For neighborhood building projects, a similar requirement existed. The federal government required them to be explicitly segregated to be federally backed.
The federal government's financial backing also required the use of
racially restrictive covenants, that banned white homeowners from reselling their house to any Black buyers, effectively locking Black Americans out of the housing market.
The government encouraged white families to move into suburbs by granting them loans, which were refused to Black Americans. Many established African American communities were disrupted by the routing of
interstate highways
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, or the Eisenhower Interstate System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National H ...
through their neighborhoods. In order to build these elevated highways, the government destroyed tens of thousands of single-family homes. Because these properties were summarily declared to be "in decline", families were given pittances for their properties, and forced to move into federally-funded housing which was called "
the projects". To build these projects, still more single-family homes were demolished.
The
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression in the United States, Great Depressi ...
of the 1930s as a whole was racially segregated; Black people rarely worked alongside whites in New Deal programs. The largest relief program by far was the
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...
(WPA); it operated segregated units, as did its youth affiliate, the
National Youth Administration
The National Youth Administration (NYA) was a New Deal agency sponsored by Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidency. It focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 25. ...
(NYA).
Black people were hired by the WPA as supervisors in the North; of 10,000 WPA supervisors in the South, only 11 were Black. Historian
Anthony Badger argues "New Deal programs in the South routinely discriminated against black people and perpetuated segregation." In its first few weeks of operation,
Civilian Conservation Corps
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a voluntary government unemployment, work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28. The CCC was ...
(CCC) camps in the North were integrated. By July 1935, practically all the CCC camps in the United States were segregated, and Black workers were strictly limited in their assigned supervisory roles.
Philip Klinkner and
Rogers Smith
Rogers M. Smith (born September 20, 1953) is an American political scientist and author noted for his research and writing on American constitutional and political development and political thought, with a focus on issues of citizenship and r ...
argue "even the most prominent
racial liberals in the New Deal did not dare to criticize Jim Crow." Secretary of the Interior
Harold Ickes was one of the
Roosevelt Administration's most prominent supporters of Black people and former president of the Chicago chapter of the
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is an American civil rights organization formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du&nbs ...
. In 1937, when Senator
Josiah Bailey, a Democrat from North Carolina, accused him of trying to break down segregation laws, Ickes wrote him a rebuttal, saying:
:I think it is up to the states to work out their social problems if possible, and while I have always been interested in seeing that the Negro has a square deal, I have never dissipated my strength against the particular stone wall of segregation. I believe that wall will crumble when the Negro has brought himself to a high educational and economic status.... Moreover, while there are no segregation laws in the North, there is segregation in fact and we might as well recognize this.
The New Deal also provided federal benefits to Black Americans. This led many to become part of the
New Deal coalition
The New Deal coalition was an American political coalition that supported the Democratic Party beginning in 1932. The coalition is named after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, and the follow-up Democratic presidents. It was ...
from their base in Northern and Western cities where they could now vote, having in large numbers left the South during the
Great Migration.
Influenced in part by the "
Black Cabinet" advisors and the
March on Washington Movement, just prior to America's entry into World War II, Roosevelt issued
Executive Order 8802
Executive Order 8802 was an Executive order (United States), executive order signed by President of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941. It prohibited ethnic or racial discrimination in the nation's defense indust ...
, the first anti-discrimination order at the federal level and established the
Fair Employment Practices Committee.
Roosevelt's successor, President
Harry Truman
Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. As the 34th vice president in 1945, he assumed the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. Subsequen ...
appointed the
President's Committee on Civil Rights
The President's Committee on Civil Rights was a United States Presidential Commission (United States), presidential commission established by President of the United States, President Harry Truman in 1946. The committee was created by Executive ...
, and issued Executive Order 9980 and
Executive Order 9981 providing for desegregation throughout the federal government and the armed forces.
Hypersegregation
In an often-cited 1988 study,
Douglas Massey
Douglas Steven Massey (born October 5, 1952) is an American sociologist. Massey is currently a professor of sociology at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and is an adjunct professor of sociology ...
and
Nancy Denton compiled 20 existing segregation measures and reduced them to five dimensions of residential segregation.
Dudley L. Poston and Michael Micklin argue that Massey and Denton "brought conceptual clarity to the theory of segregation measurement by identifying five dimensions".
African Americans are considered to be racially segregated because of all five dimensions of segregation being applied to them within these inner cities across the U.S. These five dimensions are evenness, clustering, exposure, centralization and concentration.
''Evenness'' is the difference between the percentage of a minority group in a particular part of a city, compared to the city as a whole. ''Exposure'' is the likelihood that a minority and a majority party will come in contact with one another. ''Clustering'' is the gathering of different minority groups into a single space; clustering often leads to one big
ghetto
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group are concentrated, especially as a result of political, social, legal, religious, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other ...
and the formation of "hyperghettoization". ''Centralization'' measures the tendency of members of a minority group to be located in the middle of an urban area, often computed as a percentage of a minority group living in the middle of a city (as opposed to the outlying areas). ''Concentration'' is the dimension that relates to the actual amount of land a minority lives on within its particular city. The higher segregation is within that particular area, the smaller the amount of land a minority group will control.
In the 1980s, the rise of hypersegregation was distinctively large in Black neighborhoods. The extreme segregation of African Americans resulted in a different society lived by black and white residents. The isolation of the African American community was evident in living conditions, grocery markets, job applications, etc. As segregation shaped different lifestyles in those who live in the suburbs compare to areas with public housing, the ''Concentration'' dimension of segregation played a significant role. ''Concentration'' increased poverty in black neighborhoods by providing more expensive and less ideal living situations to African Americans. This rise of poverty created a disadvantage when it came to the job market, which led to a decrease in marriage rates in the black community due to the large number of men that weren't financially secure enough to take care of a family. Hypersegregation was prominent in creating an isolated community for African Americans in the United States. This pattern was consistent in making African American residents unstable financially which spread to other poor living conditions.
The pattern of hypersegregation began in the early 20th century. African Americans who moved to large cities often moved into the inner city in order to gain industrial jobs. The influx of new African American residents caused many white residents to move to the new suburbs (federally subsidized for white families only
) in a case of
white flight
The white flight, also known as white exodus, is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the Racism ...
. This was encouraged by the government, as many were white middle-class families who lived in
segregated public housing first established in the 1930s. The US government heavily advertised the suburbs to them and the subsidized mortgages the government provided were typically cheaper than monthly rent.
These same mortgages were not provided to Black Americans in
public housing
Public housing, also known as social housing, refers to Subsidized housing, subsidized or affordable housing provided in buildings that are usually owned and managed by local government, central government, nonprofit organizations or a ...
, leading to overcrowding, while white public housing sat vacant.
As industry began to move out of the inner city, the African American residents lost the stable jobs that had brought them to the area. Many were unable to leave the inner city and became increasingly poor.
This created the inner-city ghettos that make up the core of hypersegregation. Though the
Civil Rights Act of 1968
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 () is a Lists of landmark court decisions, landmark law in the United States signed into law by President of the United States, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots.
Titles ...
banned discrimination in housing, housing patterns established earlier saw the perpetuation of hypersegregation. Data from the 2000 census shows that 29 metropolitan areas displayed black and white hypersegregation. Two areas—Los Angeles and New York City—displayed Hispanic-white hypersegregation. No
metropolitan area
A metropolitan area or metro is a region consisting of a densely populated urban area, urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories which share Industry (economics), industries, commercial areas, Transport infrastructure, transport network ...
displayed hypersegregation for Asians or for Native Americans.
Racism
President
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat to serve as president during the Prog ...
removed many Blacks from public office. He did not oppose segregation practices by autonomous department heads of the
federal civil service, according to Brian J. Cook in his work, ''Democracy And Administration: Woodrow Wilson's Ideas And The Challenges Of Public Management''.
White and
Black people
Black is a racial classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin and often additional phenotypical ...
were required to eat separately, attend separate schools, use separate public toilets, park benches, train, buses, and even use different water fountains. Stores and restaurants often refused to serve different races under the same roof.
Public segregation was challenged by individual citizens on rare occasions but had minimal impact on civil rights issues, until December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama,
Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American civil rights activist. She is best known for her refusal to move from her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, in defiance of Jim Crow laws, which sparke ...
refused to be moved to the back of a bus for a white passenger, sparking the
Montgomery bus boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social boycott, protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United ...
. Parks's act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern
Civil Rights Movement and she became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.
Segregation was also pervasive in housing.
State constitutions (for example, that of
California
California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
) had clauses giving local jurisdictions the right to regulate where members of certain races could live. In 1917, the Supreme Court in the case of ''
Buchanan v. Warley'' ruled municipal resident segregation
ordinances were unconstitutional. In response, whites resorted to the
restrictive covenant
A covenant, in its most general and covenant (historical), historical sense, is a solemn promise to engage in or refrain from a specified action. Under historical English common law, a covenant was distinguished from an ordinary contract by the ...
, a formal deed restriction binding white property owners in a given neighborhood not to sell to Blacks. Whites who broke these agreements could be sued by "damaged" neighbors. In the 1948 case of ''
Shelley v. Kraemer'', the
U.S. Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
ruled these covenants legally unenforceable. Residential segregation patterns had already become established in most American cities and have often persisted up to the present from the impact of
white flight
The white flight, also known as white exodus, is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the Racism ...
and
redlining
Redlining is a Discrimination, discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of Race (human categorization), racial and Ethnic group, ethnic minorities. Redlining has been mos ...
.
In most cities, the only way Blacks could relieve the pressure of crowding that resulted from increasing migration was to expand residential borders into surrounding previously white neighborhoods, a process that often resulted in harassment and attacks by white residents whose intolerant attitudes were intensified by fears that Black neighbors would cause property values to decline. Moreover, the increased presence of African Americans in cities, North and South, as well as their competition with whites for housing, jobs, and political influence sparked a series of race riots. In 1898 white citizens of
Wilmington, North Carolina
Wilmington is a port city in New Hanover County, North Carolina, United States. With a population of 115,451 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, eighth-most populous city in the st ...
, resenting African Americans' involvement in local government and incensed by an editorial in an
African American newspaper accusing white women of loose sexual behavior, rioted and killed dozens of Blacks. In the fury's wake,
white supremacists overthrew the city government, expelling black and white officeholders, and instituted
restrictions to prevent Blacks from voting. In Atlanta in 1906, newspaper accounts alleging attacks by black men on white women provoked an outburst of shooting and killing that left twelve Blacks dead and seventy injured. An influx of unskilled black strikebreakers into
East St Louis, Illinois, heightened
racial tensions in 1917. Rumors that Blacks were arming themselves for an attack on whites resulted in numerous attacks by white mobs on black neighborhoods. On July 1, Blacks fired back at a car whose occupants they believed had shot into their homes and mistakenly killed two policemen riding in a car. The next day, a full-scaled riot erupted which ended only after nine whites and thirty-nine blacks had been killed and over three hundred buildings were destroyed.
Anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage sometimes, also criminalizing sex between members of different races.
In the United Stat ...
(also known as miscegenation laws) prohibited whites and non-whites from marrying each other. The first ever
anti-miscegenation law was passed by the
Maryland General Assembly
The Maryland General Assembly is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Maryland that convenes within the State House in Annapolis. It is a bicameral body: the upper chamber, the Maryland Senate, has 47 representatives, and the lower ...
in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage.
During one of his
famous debates with
Stephen A. Douglas
Stephen Arnold Douglas (né Douglass; April 23, 1813 – June 3, 1861) was an American politician and lawyer from Illinois. As a United States Senate, U.S. senator, he was one of two nominees of the badly split Democratic Party (United States) ...
in
Charleston, Illinois
Charleston is a city in and the county seat of Coles County, Illinois, United States. The population was 17,286, as of the 2020 census. The city is home to Eastern Illinois University and has close ties with its neighbor, Mattoon, Illinois, Ma ...
in 1858,
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War ...
stated,
By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes.
By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still enforced in 29 states.
While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor
Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with white actress
Kim Novak
Marilyn Pauline "Kim" Novak (born February 13, 1933) is an American retired actress and painter. Her contributions to cinema have been honored with two Golden Globe Awards, an Honorary Golden Bear, a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and a s ...
.
Harry Cohn
Harry Cohn (July 23, 1891 – February 27, 1958) was a co-founder, president, and production director of Columbia Pictures, Columbia Pictures Corporation.
Life and career
Cohn was born to a working-class Jewish family in New York City. His fath ...
, the president of Columbia Pictures (with whom Novak was under contract) gave in to his concerns that a racist backlash against the relationship could hurt the studio.
Davis briefly married black dancer Loray White in 1958 to protect himself from mob violence.
Inebriated at the wedding ceremony, Davis despairingly said to his best friend, Arthur Silber Jr., "Why won't they let me live my life?"
The couple never lived together and commenced divorce proceedings in September 1958.
[Lanzendorfer, Joy (August 9, 2017]
"Hollywood Loved Sammy Davis Jr. Until He Dated a White Movie Star"
'' Smithsonian'' Retrieved February 23, 2021. When former president
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. As the 34th vice president in 1945, he assumed the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. Subsequen ...
was asked by a reporter in 1963 if interracial marriage would become widespread in the U.S., he responded, "I hope not; I don't believe in it", before asking a question often aimed at anyone advocating racial integration, "Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro? She won't love someone who isn't her color."
In 1958, officers in
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...
entered the home of
Richard and Mildred Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years.
In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile, who heard their original case, defended his decision:

In
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, blacks served in the
United States Armed Forces
The United States Armed Forces are the Military, military forces of the United States. U.S. United States Code, federal law names six armed forces: the United States Army, Army, United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps, United States Navy, Na ...
in segregated units. The 369th Infantry (formerly 15th New York National Guard) Regiment distinguished themselves and were known as the "
Harlem Hellfighters".

The U.S. military was still very segregated in World War II. The
Army Air Corps (forerunner of the
Air Force
An air force in the broadest sense is the national military branch that primarily conducts aerial warfare. More specifically, it is the branch of a nation's armed services that is responsible for aerial warfare as distinct from an army aviati ...
) and the
Marines
Marines (or naval infantry) are military personnel generally trained to operate on both land and sea, with a particular focus on amphibious warfare. Historically, the main tasks undertaken by marines have included Raid (military), raiding ashor ...
had no blacks enlisted in their ranks. There were blacks in the Navy
Seabees
United States Naval Construction Battalions, better known as the Navy Seabees, form the U.S. Naval Construction Forces (NCF). The Seabee nickname is a heterograph of the initial letters "CB" from the words "Construction Battalion". Dependi ...
. Before the war, the army had only five African American officers.
[ No African American received the ]Medal of Honor
The Medal of Honor (MOH) is the United States Armed Forces' highest Awards and decorations of the United States Armed Forces, military decoration and is awarded to recognize American United States Army, soldiers, United States Navy, sailors, Un ...
during the war, and they were mostly relegated to non-combat units. Black soldiers were sometimes forced to give up their seats in trains to Nazi
Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
prisoners of war. World War II saw the first black military pilots in the U.S., the Tuskegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of primarily African American military pilots (fighter and bomber) and airmen who fought in World War II. They formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Fighter Group, 477th Bombardment Group (Medium) of th ...
, 99th Fighter Squadron, and also saw the segregated 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion participate in the liberation of Jewish survivors at Buchenwald concentration camp
Buchenwald (; 'beech forest') was a German Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Nazi Germany, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich (pre-1938 ...
. Despite the institutional policy of racially segregated training for enlisted members and in tactical units; Army policy dictated that black and white soldiers train together in officer candidate school
An officer candidate school (OCS) is a military school which trains civilians and Enlisted rank, enlisted personnel in order for them to gain a Commission (document), commission as Commissioned officer, officers in the armed forces of a country. H ...
s (beginning in 1942). Thus, the Officer Candidate School
An officer candidate school (OCS) is a military school which trains civilians and Enlisted rank, enlisted personnel in order for them to gain a Commission (document), commission as Commissioned officer, officers in the armed forces of a country. H ...
became the Army's first formal experiment with integration – with all Officer Candidates, regardless of race, living and training together.
During World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, 110,000 people of Japanese descent (whether citizens or not) were placed in internment camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without Criminal charge, charges or Indictment, intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects ...
s. Hundreds of people of German and Italian descent were also imprisoned (see German American internment and Italian American internment). While the government program of Japanese American internment
During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. Abou ...
targeted all the Japanese in America as enemies, most German and Italian Americans were left in peace and were allowed to serve in the U.S. military.
Pressure to end racial segregation in the government
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a State (polity), state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive (government), execu ...
grew among African Americans and progressives after the end of World War II. On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. As the 34th vice president in 1945, he assumed the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. Subsequen ...
signed Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the United States Armed Forces.
A club central to the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the ti ...
in the 1920s, the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City, was a whites-only establishment, with blacks (such as Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American Jazz piano, jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous Big band, jazz orchestra from 1924 through the rest of his life.
Born and raised in Washington, D ...
) allowed to perform, but to a white audience. The first black Oscar
Oscar, OSCAR, or The Oscar may refer to:
People and fictional and mythical characters
* Oscar (given name), including lists of people and fictional characters named Oscar, Óscar or Oskar
* Oscar (footballer, born 1954), Brazilian footballer ...
recipient Hattie McDaniel was not permitted to attend the premiere of ''Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind most often refers to:
* Gone with the Wind (novel), ''Gone with the Wind'' (novel), a 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell
* Gone with the Wind (film), ''Gone with the Wind'' (film), the 1939 adaptation of the novel
Gone with the Wind ...
'' with Atlanta being racially segregated, and at the 12th Academy Awards ceremony at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
she was required to sit at a segregated table at the far wall of the room; the hotel had a no-blacks policy, but allowed McDaniel in as a favor. McDaniel's final wish to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery was denied because the graveyard was restricted to whites only.
On September 11, 1964, John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer-songwriter, musician and activist. He gained global fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's ...
announced The Beatles
The Beatles were an English Rock music, rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. The core lineup of the band comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are widely regarded as the Cultural impact of the Beatle ...
would not play to a segregated audience in Jacksonville, Florida
Jacksonville ( ) is the most populous city proper in the U.S. state of Florida, located on the Atlantic coast of North Florida, northeastern Florida. It is the county seat of Duval County, Florida, Duval County, with which the City of Jacksonv ...
. City officials relented following this announcement.["The Beatles banned segregated audiences, contract shows"](_blank)
BBC. Retrieved July 17, 2017 A contract for a 1965 Beatles concert at the Cow Palace
The Cow Palace (originally the California State Livestock Pavilion) is an indoor arena and events center located in Daly City, California, situated on the city's northern border with neighboring San Francisco. Because the border passes through t ...
in Daly City, California
Daly City () is the second-most populous city in San Mateo County, California, United States. Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and immediately south of San Francisco (sharing its northern border with almost all of San Francisco's southern ...
, specifies that the band "not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience".
Despite all the legal changes that have taken place since the 1940s and especially in the 1960s (see Desegregation), the United States remains, to some degree, a segregated society, with housing patterns, school enrollment, church membership, employment opportunities, and even college admissions all reflecting significant ''de facto'' segregation. Supporters of affirmative action
Affirmative action (also sometimes called reservations, alternative access, positive discrimination or positive action in various countries' laws and policies) refers to a set of policies and practices within a government or organization seeking ...
argue that the persistence of such disparities reflects either racial discrimination or the persistence of its effects.
'' Gates v. Collier'' was a case decided in federal court that brought an end to the trusty system and flagrant inmate abuse at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi. In 1972 federal judge
Federal judges are judges appointed by a federal level of government as opposed to the state/provincial/local level. United States
A U.S. federal judge is appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in accordance with Arti ...
, William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated modern standards of decency. He ordered an immediate end to all unconstitutional conditions and practices. Racial segregation of inmates was abolished. And the trusty system, which allowed certain inmates to have power and control over others, was also abolished.
More recently, the disparity between the racial compositions of inmates in the American prison system has led to concerns that the U.S. Justice system furthers a "new apartheid
Apartheid ( , especially South African English: , ; , ) was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was characterised by an ...
".
Scientific racism
The intellectual roots of '' Plessy v. Ferguson'', the landmark United States Supreme Court decision which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, under the doctrine of "separate but equal", were partially tied to the scientific racism
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that the Human, human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "race (human categorization), races", and that empirical evi ...
of the era. The popular support of the decision was likely a result of the racist beliefs which were held by most whites at the time. Later, the court decision ''Brown v. Board of Education
''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the ...
'' rejected the ideas of scientific racists about the need for segregation, especially in schools. Following that decision both scholarly and popular ideas of scientific racism played an important role in the attack and backlash that followed the court decision.
The ''Mankind Quarterly
''Mankind Quarterly'' is a pseudoscientific journal that covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It has been described as a "cornersto ...
'' is a journal that has published scientific racism. It was founded in 1960, partly in response to the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision ''Brown v. Board of Education'', which ordered the desegregation of US schools. Many of the publication's contributors, publishers, and board of directors espouse academic hereditarianism. The publication is widely criticized for its extremist politics, antisemitic
Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...
bent and its support for scientific racism.
In the South
After the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops, which followed from the Compromise of 1877
The Compromise of 1877, also known as the Wormley Agreement, the Tilden-Hayes Compromise, the Bargain of 1877, or Corrupt bargain, the Corrupt Bargain, was a speculated unwritten political deal in the United States to settle the intense dispute ...
, the Democratic governments in the South instituted state laws to separate black and white racial groups, submitting African Americans to ''de facto'' second-class citizenship and enforcing white supremacy
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine ...
. Collectively, these state laws were called the Jim Crow
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, " Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. The last of the ...
system, after the name of a stereotypical 1830s black minstrel show
The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century. The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of portraying racial stereotypes of Afr ...
character.[Remembering Jim Crow](_blank)
– Minnesota Public Radio Sometimes, as in Florida's Constitution of 1885, segregation was mandated by state constitutions.
Racial segregation became the law in most parts of the American South
The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, Dixieland, or simply the South) is census regions United States Census Bureau. It is between the Atlantic Ocean and the ...
until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. These laws, known as Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were U.S. state, state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, "Jim Crow (character), Ji ...
, forced segregation of facilities and services, prohibited intermarriage, and denied suffrage. Impacts included:
* Segregation of facilities included separate schools, hotels, bars, hospitals, toilets, parks, even telephone booths, and separate sections in libraries, cinemas, and restaurants, the latter often with separate ticket windows and counters.
** After Reconstruction, many southern states passed Jim Crow laws and followed the "separate but equal" doctrine created during the '' Plessy v. Ferguson'' case. Segregated libraries under this system existed in most parts of the south. The East Henry Street Carnegie library in Savannah, Georgia
Savannah ( ) is the oldest city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia and the county seat of Chatham County, Georgia, Chatham County. Established in 1733 on the Savannah River, the city of Savannah became the Kingdom of Great Brita ...
, built by African Americans during the segregation era in 1914 with help from the Carnegie foundation, is one example. Hundreds of segregated libraries existed across the United States prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and United States labor law, labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on Race (human categorization), race, Person of color, color, religion, sex, and nationa ...
. These libraries were often underfunded, understocked, and had fewer services than their white counterparts. Only during the landmark ''Brown v. Board of Education
''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the ...
'' was the acknowledgement that separate was never equal and that African Americans were not segregating by choice. During the Civil rights movement, several demonstrations and sit-ins were orchestrated by activist including nine Tougaloo College students who were arrested when they requested service from the all-white Jackson Public Library in Mississippi. Another example was the St. Helena Four, where four local teenagers made several attempts to use the Auburn Regional Library located in Greensburg, Louisiana. Police were typically called on these civil rights activists usually resulting in some form of intimidation or incarceration. Libraries in several states continued their segregation practices even after the "separate but equal" doctrine was overruled by the Civil Rights Act. In 1964 E. J. Josey, the first African American member of ALA, put forth a resolution preventing ALA officers and staff members to attend segregated state chapter meetings. The segregated states being targeted by this resolution were Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. This resolution led to the integration of these state's libraries within a few years.
* Laws prohibited blacks from being present in certain locations. For example, blacks in 1939 were not allowed on the streets of Palm Beach, Florida
Palm Beach is an incorporated town in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. Located on a barrier island in east-central Palm Beach County, the town is separated from West Palm Beach, Florida, West Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach, Florida, ...
after dark, unless required by their employment.
* State laws prohibiting interracial marriage ("miscegenation
Miscegenation ( ) is marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races or ethnicities. It has occurred many times throughout history, in many places. It has occasionally been controversial or illegal. Adjectives describin ...
") had been enforced throughout the South and in many Northern states since the colonial era. During Reconstruction
Reconstruction may refer to:
Politics, history, and sociology
*Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company
*''Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Union ...
, such laws were repealed in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Texas and South Carolina. In all these states such laws were reinstated after the Democratic "Redeemers
The Redeemers were a political coalition in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era of the United States, Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War. Redeemers were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party (Unite ...
" came to power. The Supreme Court
In most legal jurisdictions, a supreme court, also known as a court of last resort, apex court, high (or final) court of appeal, and court of final appeal, is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
declared such laws constitutional in 1883. This verdict was overturned only in 1967 by ''Loving v. Virginia
''Loving v. Virginia'', 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that the laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to ...
''.
* The voting rights of blacks were systematically restricted or denied through suffrage
Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise is the right to vote in public, political elections and referendums (although the term is sometimes used for any right to vote). In some languages, and occasionally in English, the right to v ...
laws, such as the introduction of poll taxes
A poll tax, also known as head tax or capitation, is a tax levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. ''Poll'' is an archaic term for "head" or "top of the head". The sen ...
and literacy tests. Loopholes, such as the grandfather clause and the understanding clause, protected the voting rights of white people who were unable to pay the tax or pass the literacy test. (See Senator Benjamin Tillman's open defense of this practice.) Only whites could vote in Democratic Party primary contests. Where and when black people did manage to vote in numbers, their votes were negated by systematic gerrymander
Gerrymandering, ( , originally ) defined in the contexts of Representative democracy, representative electoral systems, is the political manipulation of Boundary delimitation, electoral district boundaries to advantage a Political party, pa ...
of electoral boundaries.
* In theory the segregated facilities available for negroes were of the same quality as those available to whites, under the separate but equal doctrine. In practice this was rarely the case. For example, in Martin County, Florida
Martin County is a County (United States), county located in the southeastern part of the U.S. state, state of Florida, in the United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 158,431. Its county seat is Stua ...
, students at Stuart Training School "read second-hand books...that were discarded from their all-white counterparts at Stuart High School. They also wore secondhand basketball and football uniforms.... The students and their parents built the basketball court and sidewalks at the school without the help of the school board. 'We even put in wiring for lights along the sidewalk, but the school board never connected the electricity.
In the North
Formal segregation was enforced in the North. Some neighborhoods were restricted to blacks and job opportunities had denied them by unions in, for example, the skilled building trades. Blacks who moved to the North in the Great Migration after World War I sometimes could live without the same degree of oppression experienced in the South, but the racism and discrimination still existed in many ways such as discrimination in housing.
The rapid influx of blacks during the Great Migration disturbed the racial balance within Northern and Western cities, exacerbating hostility between both blacks and whites in the two regions. Deed restrictions and restrictive covenants became an important instrument for enforcing racial segregation in most towns and cities, becoming widespread in the 1920s. Such covenants were employed by many real estate developers to "protect" entire subdivisions, with the primary intent to keep "white
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no chroma). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully (or almost fully) reflect and scatter all the visible wa ...
" neighborhoods "white". Ninety percent of the housing projects built in the years following World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
were racially restricted by such covenants. Cities known for their widespread use of racial covenants include Chicago
Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...
, Baltimore
Baltimore is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland. With a population of 585,708 at the 2020 census and estimated at 568,271 in 2024, it is the 30th-most populous U.S. city. The Baltimore metropolitan area is the 20th-large ...
, Detroit
Detroit ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is situated on the bank of the Detroit River across from Windsor, Ontario. It had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United State ...
, Milwaukee
Milwaukee is the List of cities in Wisconsin, most populous city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Located on the western shore of Lake Michigan, it is the List of United States cities by population, 31st-most populous city in the United States ...
, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
, Seattle
Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...
, and St. Louis
St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a populatio ...
.
Cicero, Illinois
Cicero is a town in Cook County, Illinois, United States, and a suburb of Chicago. As of the 2020 census, the population was 85,268, making it the 11th-most populous municipality in Illinois. The town is named after Marcus Tullius Cicero, a R ...
, a former sundown town
Sundown towns, also known as sunset towns, gray towns, or sundowner towns, were all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States. They were towns that practiced a form of racial segregation by excluding non-whites via some combinati ...
adjacent to Chicago, for example, was made famous when Civil Rights advocate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil and political rights, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights move ...
led a march advocating open (race-unbiased) housing in 1966.
Within employment, economic opportunities for blacks were routed to the lowest-status and restrictive in potential mobility. In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South. There seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his economic condition even than in the South." In the 1930s, job discrimination ended for many African Americans in the North, after the Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of Labor unions in the United States, unions that organized workers in industrial unionism, industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Originally created in ...
, one of America's lead labor unions at the time, agreed to integrate the union.
School segregation in the North was also a major issue. In Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, towns in the south of those states enforced school segregation, despite the fact that it was prohibited by state laws. Indiana also required school segregation by state law. During the 1940s, NAACP lawsuits quickly depleted segregation from the Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey southern areas. In 1949, Indiana officially repealed its school segregation law as well. The most common form of segregation in the northern states came from anti-miscegenation laws.
The state of Oregon
Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...
went farther than even any of the Southern states, specifically excluding blacks from entering the state, or from owning property within it. School integration did not come about until the mid-1970s. As of 2017, the population of Oregon was about 2% black.
In Alaska
Racial segregation in Alaska
Alaska ( ) is a non-contiguous U.S. state on the northwest extremity of North America. Part of the Western United States region, it is one of the two non-contiguous U.S. states, alongside Hawaii. Alaska is also considered to be the north ...
was primarily targeted at Alaska Natives
Alaska Natives (also known as Native Alaskans, Alaskan Indians, or Indigenous Alaskans) are the Indigenous peoples of Alaska that encompass a diverse arena of cultural and linguistic groups, including the Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tli ...
. In 1905, the Nelson Act
The Bankruptcy Act of 1898 ("Nelson Act", July 1, 1898, ch. 541, ) was the first United States Act of Congress involving bankruptcy in the United States, bankruptcy to give companies an option of being protected from creditors. Previous attempts ...
specified an educational system for whites and one for indigenous Alaskans. Public areas such as playgrounds, swimming pools, and theaters were also segregated. Groups such as the Alaska Native Brotherhood
The Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) and its counterpart, the Alaska Native Sisterhood (ANS), are two nonprofit organizations founded to address racism against Alaska Native peoples in Alaska. ANB was formed in 1912 and ANS founded three years lat ...
(ANB) staged boycotts of places that supported segregation. In 1941, Elizabeth Peratrovich (Tlingit
The Tlingit or Lingít ( ) are Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. , they constitute two of the 231 federally recognized List of Alaska Native tribal entities, Tribes of Alaska. Most Tlingit are Alaska Natives; ...
) and her husband argued to the governor of Alaska, Ernest Gruening, that segregation was "very Un-American". Gruening supported anti-discrimination laws and pushed for their passage. In 1944, Alberta Schenck ( Inupiaq) staged a sit-in in the whites-only section of a theater in Nome. In 1945, the first anti-discrimination law
Anti-discrimination law or non-discrimination law refers to legislation designed to prevent discrimination against particular groups of people; these groups are often referred to as protected groups or protected classes. Anti-discrimination laws ...
in the United States, the Alaska Equal Rights Act, was passed in Alaska. The law made segregation illegal and banned signs that discriminate based on race.
Sports
Segregation in sports in the United States
Sports in the United States are an important part of the Culture of the United States, nation's culture. Historically, the most popular sport has been baseball. However, in more recent decades, American football has been the most popular spectato ...
was also a major national issue. In 1900, just four years after the US Supreme Court "separate but equal" constitutional ruling, segregation was enforced in horse racing
Horse racing is an equestrian performance activity, typically involving two or more horses ridden by jockeys (or sometimes driven without riders) over a set distance for competition. It is one of the most ancient of all sports, as its bas ...
, a sport which had previously seen many African American jockeys win the Triple Crown and other major races. Widespread segregation also existed in bicycle and automobile racing. In 1890, segregation lessened for African-American track and field
Track and field (or athletics in British English) is a sport that includes Competition#Sports, athletic contests based on running, jumping, and throwing skills. The name used in North America is derived from where the sport takes place, a ru ...
athletes after various universities and colleges in the northern states agreed to integrate their track and field teams. Like track and field, soccer
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 Football player, players who almost exclusively use their feet to propel a Ball (association football), ball around a rectangular f ...
was another which experienced a low amount of segregation in the early days of segregation. Many colleges and universities in the northern states allowed African Americans to play on their football teams.
Segregation was also hardly enforced in boxing. In 1908, Jack Johnson became the first African American to win the World Heavyweight Title. Johnson's personal life (i.e. his publicly acknowledged relationships with white women) made him very unpopular among many Caucasians throughout the world. In 1937, when Joe Louis
Joseph Louis Barrow (May 13, 1914 – April 12, 1981) was an American professional boxer who competed from 1934 to 1951. Nicknamed "the Brown Bomber", Louis is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential boxers of all time. He r ...
defeated German boxer Max Schmeling
Maximilian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling (, ; 28 September 1905 – 2 February 2005) was a German boxing, boxer who was heavyweight champion of the world between 1930 and 1932. His two fights with Joe Louis in 1936 and 1938 were worldwide cul ...
, the general American public embraced an African American as the World Heavyweight Champion.
In 1904, Charles Follis became the first African American to play for a professional football team, the Shelby Blues, and professional football leagues agreed to allow only a limited number of teams to be integrated. In 1933, the NFL, now the only major football league in the United States, reversed its limited integration policy and completely segregated the entire league. The NFL color barrier permanently broke in 1946, when the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode
Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode (July 25, 1914 – December 31, 1994) was an American athlete, actor, and author. He was a decathlon, decathlete and American football, football star who was one of the first Black American players in the National ...
and the Cleveland Browns hired Marion Motley and Bill Willis.
Prior to the 1930s, basketball saw a great deal of discrimination as well. Blacks and whites played mostly in different leagues and usually were forbidden from playing in inter-racial games. The popularity of the African American Harlem Globetrotters altered the American public's acceptance of African Americans in basketball. By the end of the 1930s, many northern colleges and universities allowed African Americans to play on their teams. In 1942, the color barrier for basketball was removed after Bill Jones and three other African American basketball players joined the Toledo Jim White Chevrolet NBL franchise and five Harlem Globetrotters joined the Chicago Studebakers.
In 1947, the baseball color line
The color line, also known as the color barrier, in American baseball excluded players of black African descent from Major League Baseball and its affiliated Minor League Baseball, Minor Leagues until 1947 (with a few notable exceptions in the 1 ...
was broken when Negro league baseball
The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be used narrowly for the seven relativel ...
player Jackie Robinson
Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball player who became the first Black American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. Robinson broke the Baseball color line, ...
joined the Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1883 as the Brooklyn Grays. In 1884, it became a member of the American Association as the Brooklyn Atlantics before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brook ...
and had a breakthrough season. This opened the doors for many African American baseball players to follow after him.
By the end of 1949, only 15 states had no segregation laws in effect. and only eighteen states had outlawed segregation in public accommodations. Of the remaining states, twenty still allowed school segregation to take place, fourteen still allowed segregation to remain in public transportation and 30 still enforced laws forbidding miscegenation
Miscegenation ( ) is marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races or ethnicities. It has occurred many times throughout history, in many places. It has occasionally been controversial or illegal. Adjectives describin ...
.
NCAA Division I
NCAA Division I (D-I) is the highest division of intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States, which accepts players globally. D-I schools include the major collegiate athlet ...
has two historically black athletic conferences: Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference
The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC ) is a List of NCAA conferences, collegiate athletic conference whose full members are historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and the Mid-A ...
(founded in 1970) and Southwestern Athletic Conference
The Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) is a collegiate List of NCAA conferences, athletic conference headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, which is made up of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the Southern United St ...
(founded in 1920). The Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (founded in 1912) and Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (founded in 1913) are part of the NCAA Division II
NCAA Division II (D-II) is the intermediate-level division of competition in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It offers an alternative to both the larger and better-funded Division I and to the scholarship-free environment ...
, whereas the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference
The HBCU Athletic Conference (HBCUAC), formerly known as the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference, is a college athletic conference made up entirely of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that is affiliated with the National Asso ...
(founded in 1981) is part of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) established in 1940, is a college athletics association for higher education, colleges and universities in North America. Most colleges and universities in the NAIA offer athletic schola ...
Division I.
In 1948, the National Association for Intercollegiate Basketball became the first national organization to open their intercollegiate postseason to black student-athletes. In 1953, it became the first collegiate association to invite historically black colleges and universities
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of serving African Americans. Most are in the Southern U ...
into its membership.
Golf was racially segregated until 1961. The Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA) had an article in its bylaws stating that it was "for members of the Caucasian race". Once the color restrictions were lifted, the United Golf Association Tour (UGA), made up of black players, ceased operations.
Public swimming pool
A swimming pool, swimming bath, wading pool, paddling pool, or simply pool, is a structure designed to hold water to enable Human swimming, swimming and associated activities. Pools can be built into the ground (in-ground pools) or built abo ...
s proved to be particularly contentious venues for segregation, where "issues of hygiene, class, and gender coalesced to create an environment where segregation was especially pronounced". As efforts to desegregate pools strengthened throughout the 1940s through to the end of the 1960s, many municipalities chose to close their facilities either temporarily or permanently in an effort to avoid operating integrated facilities. One of the effects of this is demarcated by a clear divide between the prevalence of swimming ability demonstrated by people of color when compared against their white counterparts who had greater access to both swimming facilities and the programs they offered. This disparate access to swimming facilities also contributed to the development of a racial stereotype
In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalization, generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can ...
which suggests people of color cannot swim for reasons related to physicality.
Contemporary
Black–white segregation is consistently declining for most metropolitan areas and cities, though there are geographical differences. In 2000, for instance, the US Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau, officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. federal statistical system, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The U.S. Census Bureau is part of the U ...
found that residential segregation has on average declined since 1980 in the West and South, but less so in the Northeast and Midwest. Indeed, the top ten most segregated cities are in the Rust Belt
The Rust Belt, formerly the Steel Belt or Factory Belt, is an area of the United States that underwent substantial Deindustrialization, industrial decline in the late 20th century. The region is centered in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic (Uni ...
, where total populations have declined in the last few decades. Despite these pervasive patterns, changes for individual areas are sometimes small. Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remained a residentially segregated society in which blacks and whites still often inhabited vastly different neighborhoods. An article in ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' newspaper cited a study from the University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
that "more than 80% of America's large metropolitan areas were more racially segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990". The study led by Stephen Menendian found present day race segregation to occur across a range of parameters including housing and property values, schools and healthcare.
Redlining
Redlining is a Discrimination, discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of Race (human categorization), racial and Ethnic group, ethnic minorities. Redlining has been mos ...
is the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking
A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...
, insurance
Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to protect ...
, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets
A supermarket is a self-service Retail#Types of outlets, shop offering a wide variety of food, Drink, beverages and Household goods, household products, organized into sections. Strictly speaking, a supermarket is larger and has a wider selecti ...
to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to Mortgage Discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in the mid-20th century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by whites to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods.
The creation of expressways in some cases divided and isolated black neighborhoods from goods and services, many times within industrial corridors. For example, Birmingham's Interstate Highway system attempted to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established by the city's 1926 racial zoning law. The construction of Interstate Highways through black neighborhoods in the city led to significant population loss in those neighborhoods and is associated with an increase in neighborhood racial segregation.
The desire of some whites to avoid having their children attend integrated schools has been a factor in white flight
The white flight, also known as white exodus, is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the Racism ...
to the suburbs, and in the foundation of numerous segregation academies
Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S ...
and private schools
A private school or independent school is a school not administered or funded by the government, unlike a public school. Private schools are schools that are not dependent upon national or local government to finance their financial endowme ...
which most African-American students, though technically permitted to attend, are unable to afford. Recent studies in San Francisco showed that groups of homeowners tended to self-segregate to be with people of the same education level and race. By 1990, the legal barriers enforcing segregation had been mostly replaced by indirect factors, including the phenomenon where whites pay more than blacks to live in predominantly white areas. The residential and social segregation of whites from blacks in the United States creates a socialization process that limits whites' chances for developing meaningful relationships with blacks and other minorities. The segregation experienced by whites from blacks fosters segregated lifestyles and leads them to develop positive views about themselves and negative views about blacks.
Segregation affects people from all social classes. For example, a survey conducted in 2000 found that middle-income, suburban Blacks live in neighborhoods with many more whites than do poor, inner-city blacks. But their neighborhoods are not the same as those of whites having the same socioeconomic characteristics; and, in particular, middle-class blacks tend to live with white neighbors who are less affluent than they are. While, in a significant sense, they are less segregated than poor blacks, race still powerfully shapes their residential options.
The number of hyper segregated inner-cities is now beginning to decline. By reviewing census data, Rima Wilkes and John Iceland found that nine metropolitan areas that had been hyper segregated in 1990 were not by 2000. Only two new cities, Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...
and Mobile, Alabama
Mobile ( , ) is a city and the county seat of Mobile County, Alabama, United States. The population was 187,041 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. After a successful vote to annex areas west of the city limits in July 2023, Mobil ...
, became hyper segregated over the same time span. These points toward a trend of greater integration across most of the United States.
Residential
Racial segregation is most pronounced in housing. Although in the U.S. people of different races may work together, they are still very unlikely to live in integrated neighborhoods. This pattern differs only by degree in different metropolitan areas.
Residential segregation persists for a variety of reasons. Segregated neighborhoods may be reinforced by the practice of "steering
Steering is the control of the direction of motion or the components that enable its control. Steering is achieved through various arrangements, among them ailerons for airplanes, rudders for boats, cylic tilting of rotors for helicopters, ...
" by real estate agents. This occurs when a real estate agent makes assumptions about where their client might like to live based on the color of their skin. Housing discrimination
Housing discrimination refers to patterns of discrimination that affect a person's ability to rent or buy housing. This disparate treatment of a person on the housing market can be based on group characteristics or on the place where a person liv ...
may occur when landlords lie about the availability of housing based on the race of the applicant or give different terms and conditions to the housing based on race; for example, requiring that black families pay a higher security deposit than white families.
Redlining
Redlining is a Discrimination, discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of Race (human categorization), racial and Ethnic group, ethnic minorities. Redlining has been mos ...
has helped preserve segregated living patterns for blacks and whites in the United States because discrimination motivated by prejudice
Prejudice can be an affect (psychology), affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived In-group and out-group, social group membership. The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavourable) evaluation or classifi ...
is often contingent on the racial composition of neighborhoods where the loan is sought and the race of the applicant. Lending institutions have been shown to treat black mortgage applicants differently when buying homes in white neighborhoods than when buying homes in black neighborhoods in 1998.
These discriminatory practices are illegal. The Fair Housing Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 () is a Lists of landmark court decisions, landmark law in the United States signed into law by President of the United States, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots.
Titles ...
of 1968 prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity
An office is a space where the employees of an organization perform administrative work in order to support and realize the various goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific du ...
is charged with administering and enforcing fair housing laws. Any person who believes that they have faced housing discrimination based on their race can file a fair housing complaint.
Households were held back or limited to the money that could be made. Inequality was present in the workforce which lead over to the residential areas. This study provides this statistic of "The median household income of African Americans were 62 percent of non-Hispanic Whites ($27,910 vs. $44,504)" Blacks were forced by the system to be in urban and poor areas while the whites lived together, being able to afford the more expensive homes. These forced measures promoted poverty levels to rise and belittle blacks.
Massey and Denton proposed that the fundamental cause of poverty among African Americans
Family structure refers to the composition of a family, including present members and important figures from the past, as well as the quality of relationships among them. It can be visualized using a genogram to depict the family's structure, co ...
is segregation. This segregation has created the inner city black urban ghettos that create poverty trap
In economics, a cycle of poverty, poverty trap or generational poverty is when poverty seems to be inherited, preventing subsequent generations from escaping it. It is caused by self-reinforcing mechanisms that cause poverty, once it exists, to ...
s and keep blacks from being able to escape the underclass
The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a social class, class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. This group is usually considered cut off from the rest of the society.
The g ...
. It is sometimes claimed that these neighborhoods have institutionalized an inner-city black culture that is negatively stigmatized and purports the economic situation of the black community. Sociolinguist, William Labov argues that persistent segregation supports the use of African American English
African-American English (AAE) is the umbrella term for English dialects spoken predominantly by Black people in the United States and, less often, in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vern ...
(AAE) while endangering its speakers. Although AAE is stigmatized, sociolinguists who study it note that it is a legitimate dialect of English as systematic as any other. Arthur Spears argues that there is no inherent educational disadvantage in speaking AAE and that it exists in vernacular and more standard forms.
Historically, residential segregation split communities between the black inner city and white suburbs. This phenomenon is due to white flight
The white flight, also known as white exodus, is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the Racism ...
where whites actively leave neighborhoods often because of a black presence. There are more than just geographical consequences to this, as the money leaves and poverty grows, crime rates jump and businesses leave and follow the money. This creates a job shortage in segregated neighborhoods and perpetuates the economic inequality in the inner city. With the wealth and businesses gone from inner-city areas, the tax base decreases, which hurts funding for education. Consequently, those that can afford to leave the area for better schools leave decreasing the tax base for educational funding even more. Any business that is left or would consider opening doesn't want to invest in a place nobody has any money but has a lot of crime, meaning the only things that are left in these communities are poor black people with little opportunity for employment or education."
Today, a number of whites are willing, and are able, to pay a premium to live in a predominantly white neighborhood. Equivalent housing in white areas commands a higher rent. By bidding up the price of housing, many white neighborhoods again effectively shut out blacks, because blacks are unwilling, or unable, to pay the premium to buy entry into white neighborhoods. While some scholars maintain that residential segregation has continued—some sociologists have termed it "hypersegregation
Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation have been systematically separated in the United States based on racial categorizations. Notably, racial segregation in the United States was the leg ...
" or "American Apartheid"—the US Census Bureau has shown that residential segregation has been in overall decline since 1980. According to a 2012 study found that "credit markets enabled a substantial fraction of Hispanic families to live in neighborhoods with fewer black families, even though a substantial fraction of black families were moving to more racially integrated areas. The net effect is that credit markets increased racial segregation."
As of 2015, residential segregation had taken new forms in the United States with black majority minority
A majority-minority or minority-majority area is a term used to refer to a subdivision in which one or more racial, ethnic, and/or religious minorities (relative to the whole country's population) make up a majority of the local population.
Ter ...
suburbs such as Ferguson, Missouri
Ferguson is a city in St. Louis County, Missouri, St. Louis County, Missouri, United States. It is part of the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Per the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 18,527, and is predominantly Bla ...
, supplanting the historic model of black inner cities, white suburbs. Meanwhile, in locations such as Washington, D.C., gentrification
Gentrification is the process whereby the character of a neighborhood changes through the influx of more Wealth, affluent residents (the "gentry") and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has ...
had resulted in development of new white neighborhoods in historically black inner cities. Segregation occurs through premium pricing by white people of housing in white neighborhoods and exclusion of low-income housing rather than through rules which enforce segregation. Black segregation is most pronounced; Hispanic segregation less so, and Asian segregation the least.
Commercial and industrial
Lila Ammons discusses the process of establishing black-owned banks during the 1880s–1990s, as a method of dealing with the discriminatory practices of financial institution
A financial institution, sometimes called a banking institution, is a business entity that provides service as an intermediary for different types of financial monetary transactions. Broadly speaking, there are three major types of financial ins ...
s against African American citizens of the United States. Within this period, she describes five distinct periods that illustrate the developmental process of establishing these banks, which were:
1888–1928
In 1851, one of the first meetings to begin the process of establishing black-owned banks took place, although the ideas and implementation of these ideas were not utilized until 1888.
During this period, approximately 60 black-owned banks were created, which gave blacks the ability to access loans and other banking needs, which non-minority banks would not offer African Americans.
1929–1953
Only five banks were opened during this time, while seeing many black-owned banks closed, leaving these banks with an expected nine-year life span for their operations. With blacks continuing to migrate toward northern urban areas, they were challenged by high unemployment rates, due to whites taking their jobs. At this time, the entire banking industry in the U.S. was stagnated, and these smaller banks even more for having higher closure rates and lower rates of loan repayment. The first groups of banks invested their profits back into the black community, whereas banks established during this period invested their finances mainly in mortgage loan
A mortgage loan or simply mortgage (), in civil law (legal system), civil law jurisdictions known also as a hypothec loan, is a loan used either by purchasers of real property to raise funds to buy real estate, or by existing property owners t ...
s, fraternal societies, and U.S. government bonds.
1954–1969
About 20 more banks were established during this period, which also saw African Americans become active citizens by taking part in various social movements centered around economic equality, better housing, better jobs, and the desegregation of society. Through desegregation, these banks could no longer solely depend on the Black community for business and were forced to become established on the open market, by paying their employees competitive wages, and were now required to meet the needs of the entire society instead of just the Black community.
1970–1979
Urban deindustrialization
Deindustrialization is a process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity in a country or region, especially of heavy industry or manufacturing industry.
There are different interpr ...
was occurring, resulting in the number of black-owned banks being increased considerably, with 35 banks established, during this time. Although this change in economy allowed more banks to be opened, this period further impoverished African-American communities, as unemployment rates raised more with the shift in the labour market, from unskilled labor to government jobs.
1980–1990s
Approximately 20 banks were established during this time, competing with other financial institutions that serve the financial necessities of people at a lower cost.
2000s
Dan Immergluck writes that in 2003 small businesses in black neighborhoods still received fewer loans, even after accounting for business density, business size, industrial mix, neighborhood income, and the credit quality of local businesses. Gregory D. Squires wrote in 2003 that it is clear that race has long affected and continues to affect the policies and practices of the insurance industry. Workers living in American inner-cities have a harder time finding jobs than suburban workers, a factor that disproportionately affects black workers.
Rich Benjamin's book, '' Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America'', reveals the state of residential, educational, and social segregation. In analyzing racial and class segregation, the book documents the migration of white Americans from urban centers to small-town, exurban, and rural communities. Throughout the 20th Century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division result from policies and institutions that are no longer explicitly designed to discriminate. Yet the outcomes of those policies and beliefs have negative, racial impacts, namely with segregation.
Transportation
Local bus companies practiced segregation in city buses. This was challenged in Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama. Named for Continental Army major general Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River on the Gulf Coastal Plain. The population was 2 ...
by Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American civil rights activist. She is best known for her refusal to move from her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, in defiance of Jim Crow laws, which sparke ...
, who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, and by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil and political rights, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights move ...
, who organized the Montgomery bus boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social boycott, protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United ...
(1955–1956). A federal court suit in Alabama, '' Browder v. Gayle'' (1956), was successful at the district court level, which ruled Alabama's bus segregation laws illegal. It was upheld at the Supreme Court level.
In 1961 Congress of Racial Equality
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the civil rights movement. Founded in 1942, its stated mission is "to bring about ...
director James Farmer
James Leonard Farmer Jr. (January 12, 1920 – July 9, 1999) was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." ...
, other CORE members and some Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee members traveled as a mixed-race group, Freedom Riders
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the Racial segregation in the United States, segregated Southern United States, Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of t ...
, on Greyhound buses from Washington, D.C., headed toward New Orleans
New Orleans (commonly known as NOLA or The Big Easy among other nicknames) is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 at the 2020 ...
. In several states the travelers were subject to violence. In Anniston, Alabama
Anniston is a city and the county seat of Calhoun County, Alabama, Calhoun County in Alabama, United States, and is one of two urban centers/principal cities of and included in the Anniston–Oxford metropolitan area, Anniston–Oxford Metropo ...
the Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to KKK or Klan, is an American Protestant-led Christian terrorism, Christian extremist, white supremacist, Right-wing terrorism, far-right hate group. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction era, ...
attacked the buses, setting one bus on fire. After U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy resisted taking action and urged restraint by the riders, Kennedy relented. He urged the Interstate Commerce Commission
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was a regulatory agency in the United States created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The agency's original purpose was to regulate railroads (and later Trucking industry in the United States, truc ...
to issue an order directing that buses, trains, and their intermediate facilities, such as stations, restrooms and water fountains be desegregated.
Effects
Education
Segregation in education
Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...
has major social repercussions. The prejudice that many young African Americans experience causes them undue stress which has been proven to undermine cognitive development
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult bra ...
. Eric Hanushek
Eric Alan Hanushek (; born May 22, 1943) is an American economist who has written prolifically on public policy with a special emphasis on the economics of education. Since 2000, he has been a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Inst ...
and his co-authors have considered racial concentrations in schools, and they find significant effects. Black students appear to be systematically and physically hurt by larger concentrations of black students in their school. These effects extend neither to white nor to Hispanic students in the school, implying that they are related to peer interactions and not to school quality. Moreover, it appears that the effect of black concentrations in schools is largest for high-achieving black students.
Even African Americans from poor inner cities who attend universities can underperform academically due to worry about family and friends still in the poverty-stricken inner cities. Education is also used as a means to perpetuate hyper-segregation. Real estate agents often implicitly use school racial composition as a way of enticing white buyers into the segregated ring surrounding the inner city.
The percentage of black children who now go to integrated public schools is at its lowest level since 1968.
Apartheid America: Jonathan Kozol rails against a public school system that, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, is still deeply – and shamefully – segregated.
'' book review by Sarah Karnasiewicz for salon.com The words of "American apartheid" have been used in reference to the disparity between white and black schools in America. Those who compare this inequality to apartheid frequently point to unequal funding for predominantly black schools.
In Chicago, by the academic year 2002–2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white.
Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol (born September 5, 1936) is an American writer, progressivism in the United States, progressive activist, and educator, best known for his books on public education in the United States.
Education and experience
Born to Harry Ko ...
expanded on this topic in his 2005 book '' The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.''
The "New American apartheid" refers to the allegation that U.S. drug and criminal policies in practice target blacks on the basis of race. The radical left-wing web-magazine ZNet
ZNetwork, formerly known as Z Communications, is a left-wing activist-oriented media group founded in 1986 by Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent.Max Elbaum''Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che'' London, England, UK; ...
featured a series of 4 articles on "The New American Apartheid" in which it drew parallels between the treatment of blacks by the American justice system and apartheid:
Modern prisoners occupy the lowest rungs on the social class ladder, and they always have. The modern prison system (along with local jails) is a collection of ghettos or poorhouses reserved primarily for the unskilled, the uneducated, and the powerless. In increasing numbers this system is being reserved for racial minorities, especially blacks, which is why we are calling it the New American Apartheid. This is the same segment of American society that has experienced some of the most drastic reductions in income and they have been targeted for their involvement in drugs and the subsequent violence that extends from the lack of legitimate means of goal attainment.
This article has been discussed at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
Center or centre may refer to:
Mathematics
*Center (geometry), the middle of an object
* Center (algebra), used in various contexts
** Center (group theory)
** Center (ring theory)
* Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentri ...
and by several school boards attempting to address the issue of continued segregation.
Due to education being funded primarily through local and state revenue, the quality of education varies greatly depending on the geographical location of the school. In some areas, education is primarily funded through revenue from property taxes; therefore, there is a direct correlation in some areas between the price of homes and the amount of money allocated to educating the area's youth.[Massey, Douglas S. 2004. "The New Geography of Inequality in Urban America", in C. Michael Henry, ed. Race, Poverty, and Domestic Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press.] The 2010 U.S. census showed that 27.4% of all African Americans lived under the poverty line, the highest percentage of any other ethnic group in the United States. Therefore, in predominantly African American areas, otherwise known as 'ghettos', the amount of money available for education is extremely low. This is referred to as "funding segregation". This questionable system of educational funding can be seen as one of the primary reasons contemporary racial segregation continues to prosper. Predominantly Caucasian areas with more money funneled into primary and secondary educational institutions allow their students the resources to succeed academically and obtain post-secondary degrees. This practice continues to ethnically, socially and economically divide America.
Alternative certificate programs were introduced in many inner-city schools and rural areas. These programs award a person a teaching license even when they did not completed a traditional teaching degree. This program came into effect in the 1980s throughout most states in response to the dwindling number of people seeking to earn a secondary degree in education. This program has been very controversial. It is "booming despite little more than anecdotal evidence of their success. ..there are concerns about how they will perform as teachers, especially since they are more likely to end up in poor districts teaching students in challenging situations." Alternative certificate graduates tend to teach African Americans and other ethnic minorities in inner-city schools and schools in impoverished small rural towns. Therefore, impoverished minorities not only have to cope with having the smallest amount of resources for their educational facilities but also with having the least trained teachers in the nation. Valorie Delp, a mother residing in an inner-city area whose child attends a school taught by teachers awarded by an alternative certificate program notes:
One teacher we know who is in this program said he had visions of coming in to "save" the kids and the school and he really believes that this idea was kind of stoked in his program. No one ever says that you may have kids who threaten to stab you, or call you unspeakable names to your face, or can't read despite being in 7th grade.
Delp showcases that, while many graduates of these certificate programs have honorable intentions and are educated, intelligent people, there is a reason why teachers have traditionally had to take a significant amount of training before officially being certified as a teacher. The experience they gain through their practicum and extensive classroom experience equips them with the tools necessary to educate today's youth.
Some measures have been taken to try give less affluent families the ability to educate their children. President Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...
introduced the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act
The McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 is a United States federal law that provides federal money for homeless shelter programs.National Coalition for the Homeless"Fact sheet on The Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act" Ju ...
on July 22, 1987. This Act was meant to allow children the ability to succeed if their families did not have a permanent residence. Leo Stagman, a single, African American parent, located in Berkeley, California
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
, whose daughter had received a great deal of aid from the Act wrote on October 20, 2012, that, "During her education, she eo's daughterwas eligible for the free lunch program and received assistance under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Educational Act. I know my daughter's performance is hers, but I wonder where she would have been without the assistance she received under the McKinney-Vento Act. Many students at BHS owe their graduation and success to the assistance under this law."
Leo then goes on to note that, "the majority of the students receiving assistance under the act are Black and Brown". There have been various other Acts enacted to try and aid impoverished youth with the chance to succeed. One of these Acts includes the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). This Act was meant to increase the accountability of public schools and their teachers by creating standardized testing which gives an overview of the success of the school's ability to educate their students. Schools which repeatedly performed poorly could have increased attention and assistance from the federal government. One of the intended outcomes of the Act was to narrow the class and racial achievement gap in the United States by instituting common expectations for all students. Test scores have shown to be improving for minority children at the same rate as for Caucasian children, maintaining a gap.
Roland G. Fryer Jr., at Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
has noted that, "There is necessarily a trade-off between doing well and rejection by your peers when you come from a traditionally low-achieving group, especially when that group comes into contact with more outsiders." Therefore, not only are there economic and prehistoric causes of racial educational segregation, but there are also social notions that continue to be obstacles to be overcome before minority groups can achieve success in education.
Mississippi
Mississippi ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Deep South regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the north, Alabama to the east, the Gulf of Mexico to the south, Louisiana to the s ...
is one of the U.S. states where some public schools still remain highly segregated just like the 1960s when discrimination against black people was very rampant. In many communities where black kids represent the majority, white children are the only ones who enroll in small private schools. The University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi (Epithet, byname Ole Miss) is a Public university, public research university in University, near Oxford, Mississippi, United States, with a University of Mississippi Medical Center, medical center in Jackson, Miss ...
, the state's flagship academic institution enrolls unreasonably few African American and Latino young people. These schools are supposed to stand for excellence in terms of education and graduation, but the opposite is happening. Private schools located in Jackson City including small towns are populated by large numbers of white students. Continuing school segregation exists in Mississippi, South Carolina, and other communities where whites are separated from blacks.
Segregation is not limited to areas in the Deep South
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term is used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on Plantation complexes in the Southern United States, plant ...
. In New York City, 19 out of 32 school districts had fewer white students. The United States Supreme Court tried to deal with school segregation more than six decades ago but impoverished and colored students still do not have equal access to opportunities in education. In spite of this situation, the Government Accountability Office
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an independent, nonpartisan government agency within the legislative branch that provides auditing, evaluative, and investigative services for the United States Congress. It is the s ...
circulated a 108-page report that showed from 2000 up to 2014, the percentage of deprived black or Hispanic students in American K–12
K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an English language expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States and Canada, which is similar to publicly supported sch ...
public schools increased from 9 to 16 percent.
Health
Another impact of hypersegregation can be found in the health of the residents of certain areas. Poorer inner cities often lack the health care that is available in outside areas. That many inner cities are so isolated from other parts of society also is a large contributor to the poor health often found in inner-city residents. The overcrowded living conditions in the inner-city caused by hypersegregation means that the spread of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is a contagious disease usually caused by ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can al ...
, occurs much more frequently. This is known as "epidemic injustice" because racial groups confined in a certain area are affected much more often than those living outside the area.
Poor inner-city residents also must contend with other factors that negatively affect health. Research has proven that in every major American city, hyper segregated blacks are far more likely to be exposed to dangerous levels of air toxins. Daily exposure to this polluted air means that African Americans living in these areas are at greater risk of disease. Poor inner-city residents also must contend with other factors that negatively affect health. Research has proven that in every major American city, hyper segregated blacks are far more likely to be exposed to dangerous levels of air toxins. Daily exposure to this polluted air means that African Americans living in these areas are at greater risk of disease. Along with environmental issues such as air contaminants, African Americans face many additional barriers resulting from the systems built around them. For example, healthcare is not accessible to all due to geographic location or a lack of transportation. Additionally, African American women are more likely to receive improper screening and treatment for chronic diseases. While this does not happen with every doctor in the U.S., it creates mistrust between African American women and their healthcare providers, leading to a reluctance to seek treatment, which eventually results in even more serious health issues.
A 2024 study found that residential segregation resulted in negative birth outcomes for non-Hispanic Black infant populations in the area, while no comparable effects were detected for non-Hispanic White infant populations.
Crime
One area where hypersegregation seems to have the greatest effect is in violence experienced by residents. The number of violent crimes in the U.S. in general has fallen. The number of murders in the U.S. fell 9% from the 1980s to the 1990s. Despite this number, the crime rates in the hyper segregated inner cities of America continued to rise. young African American men are eleven times more likely to be shot to death and nine times more likely to be murdered than their white peers. Poverty, high unemployment, and broken families, all factors more prevalent in hyper segregated inner cities, all contribute significantly to the unequal levels of violence experienced by African Americans. Research has proven that the more segregated the surrounding white suburban ring is, the rate of violent crime in the inner-city will rise, but, likewise, crime in the outer area will drop.
Poverty
One study finds that an area's residential racial segregation increases metropolitan rates of black poverty and overall black-white income disparities, while decreasing rates of white poverty and inequality within the white population.
Single parenthood
One study finds that African Americans who live in segregated metro areas have a higher likelihood of single-parenthood than blacks who live in more integrated places. Those in poverty also show an increased chance in becoming single parents.
Public spending
Research shows that segregation along racial lines contributes to public goods
In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)Oakland, W. H. (1987). Theory of public goods. In Handbook of public economics (Vol. 2, pp. 485–535). Elsevier. is a goods, commodity, product or service that ...
inequalities. Whites and blacks are vastly more likely to support different candidates for mayor than whites and blacks in more integrated places, which makes them less able to build consensus. The lack of consensus leads to lower levels of public spending.
Costs
In April 2017, the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago and the Urban Institute
The Urban Institute is a Washington, D.C.–based think tank that conducts economic and social policy research to "open minds, shape decisions, and offer solutions". The institute receives funding from government contracts, foundations, and p ...
, a think-tank located in Washington, DC, released a study estimating that racial and economic segregation is costing the United States billions of dollars every year. Statistics (1990–2010) from at least 100 urban hubs were analyzed. This study reported that segregation affecting Blacks economically was associated with higher rates of homicide.
Caste system
Scholars including W. Lloyd Warner, Gerald Berreman
Gerald Duane Berreman (1930-2013) was an American anthropologist and ethnographer who was known for his theory on the caste system in India, as well as his contributions to the ethical practice of anthropology itself. Berreman spoke out during th ...
, and Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) is an American journalist and the author of '' The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration'' (2010) and '' Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents'' (2020). She is the first woman of African-A ...
have described the pervasive practice of racial segregation in America as an aspect of a caste system
A caste is a fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification: a caste system. Within such a system, individuals are expected to marry exclusively within the same caste (endogamy), foll ...
proper to the United States. In her 2020 book '' Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents'', Wilkerson described the system of racial segregation and discrimination in the United States as one example of a caste system by comparing it to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...
. In her view, the three systems all exhibit the defining features of caste: divine or natural justification for the system, heritability of caste, endogamy, belief in purity, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization and stigmatization of lower castes, terror and cruelty as methods of enforcement and control, and the belief in the superiority of the dominant caste.
See also
* African American history
* Auto-segregation
* Baseball color line
* Black flight, into suburbs
* Black Lives Matter
* Black nationalism
* Black Power
* Black separatism
* Black supremacy
* Discrimination based on skin color#United States
* Index of racism-related articles
* List of anti-discrimination acts
* Lynching in the United States
* Mass racial violence in the United States
* Nadir of American race relations
* Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity
An office is a space where the employees of an organization perform administrative work in order to support and realize the various goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific du ...
* '' Plessy v. Ferguson''
* Race and health
* Racial integration
* Racial segregation
* Racial segregation in Atlanta
* Racial segregation of churches in the United States
* Racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska
* Racism against African Americans
* Racism in the United States
* Segregated prom
* Segregation in Seattle
* St. Augustine movement
* Symbolic racism
* Timeline of African American history
* Timeline of the civil rights movement
* White primary
References
Sources
*
*
Further reading
* Bond, Horace Mann. "The Extent and Character of Separate Schools in the United States." ''Journal of Negro Education'' 4 (July 1935): 321–327. .
* Chafe, William Henry, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds. ''Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South'' (2003).
* Glater, Jonathan D. and Alan Finder
School Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some
The New York Times, July 15, 2007.
* Graham, Hugh. ''The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972'' (1990)
* Guyatt, Nicholas.
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
'' New York: Basic Books, 2016.
* Hanbury, Dallas. 2020. ''The Development of Southern Public Libraries and the African American Quest for Library Access 1898-1963.'' Lanham: Lexington Books.
* Hannah-Jones, Nikole. "Worlds Apart". New York Times, New York Times Magazine, June 12, 2016, pp. 34–39 and 50–55.
* Hatfield, Edward.
Segregation
" ''New Georgia Encyclopedia,'' June 1, 2007.
* Hasday, Judy L. ''The Civil Rights Act of 1964: An End to Racial Segregation'' (2007).
* Lands, LeeAnn
"A City Divided"
''Southern Spaces'', December 29, 2009.
* Levy, Alan Howard.
Tackling Jim Crow: Racial Segregation in Professional Football
' (2003).
* Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy Denton.
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
' (1993)
* Merry, Michael S. (2012). "Segregation and Civic Virtue" Educational Theory Journal 62(4), pp. 465–486.
* Myrdal, Gunnar.
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
' (1944).
* Raffel, Jeffrey. ''Historical dictionary of school segregation and desegregation: The American experience'' (Bloomsbury, 1998
online
* Ritterhouse, Jennifer. ''Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890–1940.'' (2006).
* Sitkoff, Harvard. ''The Struggle for Black Equality'' (2008)
* Tarasawa, Beth.
New Patterns of Segregation: Latino and African American Students in Metro Atlanta High Schools
, ''Southern Spaces'', January 19, 2009.
* Woodward, C. Vann. ''The Strange Career :) of Jim Crow'' (1955).
* Yellin, Eric S. ''Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America.'' Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
*
*
External links
Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity
File a housing discrimination complaint
"Remembering Jim Crow"
– Minnesota Public Radio (multi-media)
"Africans in America"
– PBS 4-Part Series
"the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow"
4-part series from PBS distributed by California Newsreel
African-American Collection from Rhode Island State Archives
*
Segregation Incorporated
, presented by Destination Freedom, written by Richard Durham in 1949
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Racial Segregation in the United States
1880s establishments in the United States
1965 disestablishments in the United States
History of racial segregation in the United States,
Anti-black racism in the United States
African-American-related controversies
Race-related controversies in the United States
United States caste system, *
Apartheid
White supremacy in the United States