Segregation in the United States

I

INTRODUCTION

Segregation in the United States, legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Segregation by law, or de jure segregation, occurred when local, state, or national laws required racial separation, or where the laws explicitly allowed segregation. De jure segregation has been prohibited in the United States since the mid-1960s. De facto segregation, or segregation in fact, occurs when social practice, political acts, economic circumstances, or public policy result in the separation of people by race or ethnicity even though no laws require or authorize racial separation. De facto segregation has continued even when state and federal civil rights laws have explicitly prohibited racial segregation.

Although this article concentrates on segregation in the United States, segregation has occurred in many parts of the world. In Europe, for example, Jews were forced to live in segregated ghettos from the mid-1500s to the late 1800s. In the 1930s Germany adopted racial laws that segregated Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other groups. However, Germany’s Third Reich went beyond segregation to the exclusion, deportation, and eventually mass murder of millions of Jews, Roma, and others. In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, laws mandated strict separation between people of African descent and people from Europe. South Africa’s system of segregation, known as apartheid, was dismantled in the early 1990s.

De jure segregation in the United States never reached the levels of German racial laws or South African apartheid. Nevertheless, segregation by law dates from the founding of the nation and was particularly widespread in the South for about 80 years, before the courts and the Congress of the United States prohibited legally sanctioned segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of the 20th century, de facto segregation remained a problem in many places in the United States. De facto segregation has resulted from residential housing patterns, economic factors, personal choice, “white flight” from central cities, and private, and often illegal, discrimination by home owners, real estate agents, and lending institutions. The results are often segregated neighborhoods, and consequently segregated schools, recreational facilities, and other public and private institutions.

II

DE JURE SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Although de jure segregation in the United States is most commonly associated with the South, at one time or another, segregation could be found in every section of the country. The nation’s first legal challenge to segregated schools, Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), took place in Massachusetts. A black man named Benjamin F. Roberts sued to force the city of Boston to allow his daughter Sarah to attend the nearest elementary school, and not have to travel across town to a segregated school. A young black attorney, Robert Morris, and Charles Sumner, who would later be the author of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, represented Roberts. Arguing before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Sumner discussed the psychological damage of segregation to young blacks. Roberts lost his case, but blacks in Massachusetts won a substantial victory when the state legislature prohibited segregation in the public schools in 1855. Blacks in Massachusetts, sometimes working with white abolitionists, also fought against segregation in public transportation and other facilities.

From the beginning, the U.S. federal government created policies that discriminated against blacks. Before the Civil War (1861-1865), blacks were not allowed to join state militias or the U.S. Army or Navy, and the federal government refused to give passports to free blacks. In the Dred Scott case (1857), the Supreme Court of the United States declared that blacks could never be citizens of the United States.

At the beginning of the Civil War, the national government refused to allow blacks to fight in the U. S. Army. However, in 1862 the U.S. government allowed blacks to enlist in segregated units, led by white officers. By the end of the war, more than 200,000 blacks had served in the U.S. Army and Navy. President Abraham Lincoln had publicly called for giving the vote to black veterans; others in the Republican Party wanted to go further, and prohibit all racial discrimination in voting. After the war, the nation adopted three constitutional amendments—the 13th (1865), ending slavery; the 14th (1868), making blacks citizens of the United States and prohibiting state laws that denied citizens equal protection under the laws; and the 15th (1870), prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. After the Civil War, most Northern states also prohibited segregation. However, into the 1940s there were pockets of de jure segregation in a few Northern states. In Western states, Hispanics and Asians faced segregation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1906 San Francisco nearly caused a diplomatic crisis when it segregated Japanese American students in its public schools. At the time, San Francisco already segregated Chinese students. A California law, which was still in force in the 1940s, authorized the segregation in the public schools of children of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and South or Southeast Asian ancestry.

A

Segregation in the South

After the Civil War, de jure segregation rapidly became the rule in the South. There had been little need for segregation before the war because about 95 percent of all blacks were slaves. However, the small free black population in the antebellum (prewar) South faced segregation or outright exclusion from schools, theaters, taverns, and other public places. After the war, Southern state legislatures, dominated by former Confederates, passed laws known as black codes that severely limited the rights of blacks. The codes were slightly different from state to state, but they usually contained limitations on black occupations and property owning, and vagrancy laws under which blacks could be forced to work for whites if they were considered unemployed. Mississippi, for example, prohibited blacks from renting property in towns or cities and provided severe penalties, including fines or imprisonment, for blacks who did not sign labor contracts agreeing to work for whites. These codes effectively segregated blacks into the rural areas of the state where they were virtually forced to become farm workers. Laws were also passed that segregated schools, courts, and juries. The black codes successfully prevented the newly freed slaves from improving their status in society.

In response to these laws, Congress, in 1866 seized the initiative in remaking the South. Congress, especially its Republican members, wanted to ensure that the South was rebuilt with the newly freed blacks as viable members of society. During Reconstruction (1865-1877), as this period of rebuilding was called, the Republican Party controlled most governments in the Southern states. Under Reconstruction, blacks gained the right to vote throughout the former Confederate states and were elected to political office in the South. By 1868 integrated Southern legislatures had repealed most of the laws that blatantly discriminated against blacks. Meanwhile, Congress acted in a number of ways to protect the rights of the former slaves. High points of Reconstruction were the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and a series of “enforcement acts” designed to implement the new amendments. In 1875 Congress passed a new Civil Rights Act, designed to prohibit segregation in public facilities and accommodations, such as theaters, hotels, and restaurants.

However, by 1877 the Democratic Party had regained control of the Southern states, ending Reconstruction. The strides that blacks had made—holding political offices, having the right to vote, and participating as equal members of society—were reversed. With the Democrats in power, the South gradually reimposed racially discriminatory laws. These laws achieved two main goals—disenfranchisement and segregation. In order to take away black political power gained during Reconstruction, the Democratic Party in the South began to disenfranchise blacks, or prevent them from voting. There were a variety of methods to stop blacks from voting, including poll taxes, fees which were charged at the voting booth and were too expensive for most blacks; and literacy tests, which required that voters be able to read to vote. Since it had been illegal to teach a slave how to read, most adult former slaves were illiterate. The Democrats also began to create a segregated society that separated blacks and whites in almost every sphere of life. They passed laws that created separate schools and separate public facilities.

In addition, the Supreme Court turned its back on racial equality. In The Civil Rights Cases (1883), the court declared that Congress had no power to prevent private acts of discrimination. Writing for the court, Justice Joseph Bradley declared: “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation ... there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.” Rather than being the “special favorites” of the law, blacks were increasingly the special targets of laws that required discrimination and segregation.

The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld the constitutionality of separate railroad cars for blacks and whites. Speaking for the court, Justice Henry Billings Brown argued that as long as the separate facilities for each race were “equal,” they were permitted under the Constitution. In dissent Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only Southerner on the court and a former slaveowner, argued that the “Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Justice Harlan pointed out that segregation created a psychological sense of superiority among whites while harming blacks.

In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the Supreme Court approved a Mississippi scheme that prevented almost all blacks in the state from either voting or serving on juries. Before 1890 about 190,000 blacks voted in Mississippi, but in the 1890s Mississippi established a system of poll taxes and literacy tests. By 1898 this system had reduced the number of black voters and potential jurors to a few thousand. The story was similar in other places; most Southern states established voting requirements that stopped blacks from voting. In 1896 there were 130,344 blacks registered to vote in Louisiana; by 1900 the new Louisiana constitution had reduced that number to 5320. Only 3000 black men in Alabama were registered to vote out of the more than 180,000 black men of voting age in 1900.

After 1900 Southern legislators carried segregation to extremes. A 1914 Louisiana statute required separate entrances at circuses for blacks and whites; a 1915 Oklahoma law segregated telephone booths; a 1920 Mississippi law made it a crime to advocate or publish “arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes.” Arkansas provided for segregation at race tracks. Texas prohibited integrated boxing matches. Kentucky not only required separate schools, but also provided that no textbook issued to a black would “ever be reissued or redistributed to a white school child” or vice versa. Similarly, Florida required that school books for blacks be stored separately from those for whites. Alabama prohibited blacks and whites from playing checkers together. All Southern states prohibited interracial marriages. Segregation touched the sacred and the profane. Georgia prohibited black ministers from performing a marriage ceremony for white couples; New Orleans created segregated red light districts for white and black prostitutes.

As the United States entered World War II (1939-1945), the South was a fully segregated society. Every school, restaurant, hotel, train car, waiting room, elevator, public bathroom, college, hospital, cemetery, swimming pool, drinking fountain, prison, and church was either for whites or blacks but never for both. In courtrooms blacks swore on one Bible and whites on another. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Southerners were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated schools, and buried in segregated graveyards.

B

Violence and Segregation

Throughout the South, segregation had the support of the legal system and the police. Beyond the law, however, there was always the threat of terrorist violence against blacks who attempted to challenge or even question the established order. During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Knights of the White Camellia, and other terrorist organizations murdered thousands of blacks and some whites in order to prevent them from voting and participating in public life. The KKK was founded in the winter of 1865 to 1866 by a former Confederate general to stop both blacks and Northerners from carrying out their government and social reforms. The Klan and other white terrorist groups directed their violence against black landowners, politicians, and community leaders, as well as whites who supported the Republican Party or racial equality. During Reconstruction only the presence of the U.S. Army prevented massive killings; however, there were never enough soldiers to stop the violence. For example, in 1876 and 1877 mobs of whites, led by former Confederate generals, killed scores of blacks in South Carolina to prevent them from voting or holding office.

In 1877 the United States withdrew its troops from the South as Reconstruction came to an end. With the demise of Reconstruction, there was an increase in racial violence as white Southerners tried to reclaim local and state governments and reestablish white domination over blacks. One of the main forms of violence was lynching, when mobs would hang or otherwise execute blacks or others who were presumed to have committed crimes. Between 1884 and 1900 white mobs lynched more than 2000 blacks in the South. The new century saw an increase in this pace. There were more than 200 lynchings just in the years 1900 and 1901. During World War I (1914-1918), lynching decreased slightly, but between 1900 and 1920 Southern whites lynched more than 1000 blacks. Many were alleged criminals, but blacks were also lynched for any violation of the code of Southern race relations such as talking to a white woman, attempting to vote, or seeming to make trouble. Lynch mobs not only hanged blacks but also burned them alive, shot them, or just beat them to death. Sometimes lynchings turned into wholesale riots. In 1904 a mob in Statesboro, Georgia, seized two blacks convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The mob burned the men alive, and then went on a rampage, beating and killing other blacks and destroying black-owned property.

In addition to lynching, blacks faced intimidation designed to prevent them from voting. The Ku Klux Klan often played major roles in political campaigns by using violence and fear to prevent blacks from voting. Blacks were also the targets of politically motivated race riots, in which whites invaded black neighborhoods. Mobs in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Atlanta, Georgia (1906), killed or injured scores of blacks as a warning not to vote before disfranchisement laws were passed. After the riots, blacks ceased to be politically active in these two states. Riots in the North took their toll as well. A 1908 riot in Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, particularly shocked the nation.

III

BLACK OPPOSITION TO SEGREGATION BEFORE WORLD WAR II

Violence and the power of state governments made resistance to segregation difficult. Nevertheless, blacks fought segregation at the ballot box, in the courtrooms, and through organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909. After the Supreme Court decision in The Civil Rights Cases in 1883, blacks throughout the nation held public meetings to discuss and protest the decision. For example, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a major speech to a large protest meeting at Lincoln Hall in Washington, D.C. In addition to protest meetings, blacks organized the Brotherhood of Liberty to plan legal and political action against segregation. The brotherhood commissioned the publication, in 1889, of the first important legal analysis of segregation, in Justice and Jurisprudence: An Inquiry Concerning the Constitutional Limitations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, a volume of more than 500 pages.

Another example of early black opposition to segregation led to the important case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In 1891 a group of people of mixed African and European ancestry, who called themselves “persons of color,” in New Orleans banded together to fight segregation on trains in Louisiana. They formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. They raised $3000 for the costs of a test case. Albion Tourgee, a former judge, nationally prominent writer, and one of the nation’s leading white advocates of black rights, agreed to take the case without fee. In June 1892 Homer A. Plessy purchased a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad and sat in a car reserved for white customers. A conductor immediately challenged Plessy’s right to sit in the “white” car. When Plessy refused to move, he was arrested and arraigned before Judge John H. Ferguson. Plessy then sued to prevent Ferguson from conducting any further proceedings against him. Eventually his challenge reached the United States Supreme Court, which—much to the anger of blacks—upheld segregation.

In 1905 a number of black activists, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, the first black to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard University, met in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada to plan strategies to fight for racial equality. By 1909 the Niagara Movement, as the group called itself, led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a racially integrated organization dedicated to fighting segregation and inequality. In addition to Du Bois, the prominent founders included a number of white activists such as philanthropists Joel and Arthur Spingarn, Jane Addams, educational reformer John Dewey, and Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of abolitionist William Loyd Garrison. Among the important black leaders joining Du Bois was Ida B. Wells, a prominent opponent of lynching.

Almost immediately, the NAACP began to challenge segregation in the courts. Before World War II started in 1939, there were a few significant victories in the Supreme Court. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the “grandfather clause” in the Oklahoma constitution. That clause allowed illiterate people to vote if they could prove their grandfathers had been voters. As a result, illiterate whites could vote but not illiterate blacks, whose grandfathers had mostly been slaves. The NAACP also challenged segregation in other areas. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the court declared unconstitutional a Louisville, Kentucky, law that required that blacks and whites live in certain sections of the city. Similarly in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the Supreme Court overturned convictions where blacks had been systematically excluded from juries. In Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Supreme Court also ruled that Missouri had to open its state supported law school to blacks, unless it was prepared to build a separate law school for them.

These rulings were important preludes to the successful assault on segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in the 1920s and 1930s they did not lead to increased voting by blacks, regular black participation as jurors, integrated neighborhoods, or increased opportunities for blacks in higher education.

IV

THE EMERGENCE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

During and after World War II, challenges to segregation became more common and more successful. Three major factors accounted for this: the great migration; the changing nature of American politics; and the social and cultural changes connected to the war itself.

A

The Great Migration

The great migration was the movement of a large number of blacks from the Southern states to the Northern and Western ones for a range of reasons including better jobs, better schools, and a less racist environment. It began during World War I, continued during the 1930s, and expanded dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s. The migration changed the nature of black population in two ways. First, it resulted in a massive movement out of the South and into the North. In 1920 there were 8,055,000 blacks living in the 11 states that had made up the Confederacy. By 1950 that number had only increased to 9,052,000. By contrast, the number of blacks in 11 Northern states grew 400 percent, from 1,086,000 in 1920 to 4,258,000 in 1950.

The second change in the black population was that blacks in both the North and South became increasingly urbanized throughout the 20th century. In 1890, 85 percent of all Southern blacks lived in rural areas; by 1920 that figure had dropped to 75 percent. In 1940, at the start of World War II, only 64 percent of Southern blacks were rural. The war accelerated this movement to urban areas. In 1950, 52 percent were rural, but by 1960 a majority of southern blacks, 58 percent, lived in urban areas. Northern blacks were always more urban, but the percentages nevertheless changed dramatically during this period as well. In 1890, 62 percent of all Northern blacks lived in urban areas; by 1960, 95 percent were urban. The urbanization accelerated during World War II, as blacks moved North to work in war-related industries. Between 1940 and 1990 Chicago’s black population grew from 282,000 to 1,197,000; New York went from 477,000 to 1,784,000; Detroit from 151,000 to 759,000; and Los Angeles from 98,000 to 505,000. The movement to the cities concentrated blacks in specific neighborhoods, often giving them enough voting power to elect local public officials. Blacks in the North did not face legal barriers to voting, and thus actively participated in the political process. Not surprisingly, white Northern politicians with large black constituencies began to oppose segregation and to support civil rights.

After World War I, blacks won numerous local elections throughout the North. In 1928, in part because of the movement of Southern blacks into Chicago, Oscar DePriest became the first black to serve in the U.S. Congress since 1901, and the first ever from the North. In addition to individual black officeholders, blacks outside of the South began to affect the election of whites. In Ohio, Kansas, and California, for example, blacks helped elect and defeat whites who supported or opposed civil rights advances. The power of urban black voters changed the political landscape and accelerated the pace of civil rights.

The great migration introduced millions of blacks to a world in which formal segregation did not exist and basic facilities, like transportation, restaurants, and public bathrooms, were open to all people. However, the North was not without racism. Blacks could not move to certain neighborhoods, were denied access to many jobs, and were informally segregated. In Chicago, for example, some public beaches on Lake Michigan, while legally open to all, were segregated by local custom, which was enforced by mob violence when blacks tried to use them. Certain labor unions, particularly in the skilled building trades, excluded blacks. But, despite de facto segregation and exclusion by individuals, unions, and employers, blacks who moved to the North were able to live without the degrading oppression of day-to-day segregation. They were thus better able to oppose legalized segregation in the South.

B

Changes in American Politics

While the great migration changed how black Americans lived, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the New Deal altered American politics by setting a precedent for government activism. The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed a new role of intervening in society to ensure jobs, justice, and the prosperity of the American people, who were severely affected by the Depression. Since the Civil War, the Republican Party had dominated American political life. Between 1868 and 1932 only two Democrats, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, held the White House. Blacks had loyally voted for the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, and until the 1920s Republican presidents had always rewarded them with small amounts of patronage. Some Republicans also remained loyal supporters of civil rights for blacks. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, had remained largely dominated by its Southern, segregationist wing. Woodrow Wilson, who had been raised in Virginia, ordered the segregation of all federal facilities in Washington, D.C. shortly after he became president.

Party alignments, and notions of race, changed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt’s huge victories in 1932 and 1936 shifted some power in the Democratic Party to Northern progressives and liberals who opposed segregation. Roosevelt himself was more progressive on race than any of his predecessors and appointed blacks to high offices, including William Hastie, appointed in 1937 as the first black federal judge.

The president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, made clear her hatred for segregation. In a gesture that symbolized a sharp break with previous administrations, she invited the National Council of Negro Women to have tea at the White House. Her most important attack on segregation came in 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow the black opera singer Marian Anderson to give a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR, while the secretary of the interior, Harold L. Ickes, invited Anderson to give an Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This symbolic gesture set a new tone in Washington, one which indicated that the national administration no longer supported segregation.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were designed to help the country recover from the Depression. New agricultural policies, public work projects, the building of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the rural electrification programs helped blacks as well as whites by providing jobs, electricity, and other conveniences, especially in the rural South. Laws regulating wages and hours as well as protecting the rights of workers to unionize raised the living standards for Americans of all races. During the 1930s Northern blacks increasingly voted for Democratic candidates. The shift began in 1934 when Arthur W. Mitchell became the first black Democrat in the history of Congress.

By the eve of World War II, black voters regularly elected officials in a number of Northern states, as well as in Kentucky and West Virginia. These newly elected officials actively fought against segregation and racism although not always successfully. By this time a majority of the members of Congress favored an anti-lynching bill, but these legislators were never able to overcome Southern filibusters in the Senate.

C

Social and Cultural Changes

A final impetus to the reinvigorated civil rights movement was World War II. The struggle against Nazism forced some Americans to reconsider the legitimacy of racism in the United States. The Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews, merely because of their ethnicity, led some Americans to realize that racism could be a threat to democracy itself. Blacks also served in the military in unprecedented numbers. By the end of the war, many blacks had served with whites in integrated units. Moreover, the Roosevelt Administration prohibited segregation on all military bases, even in the South. Thus, the war experience taught many people that equality was possible. Following the war, black veterans returned with a new sense of purpose. Joining them in the struggle against segregation was a better educated and financially more secure black middle and working class living in the North. Many blacks had earned high wages in war industries, were members of industrial unions, and politically active. While the struggle against segregation would be in the South, Northern support was essential.

Finally, the postwar world forced the national government to face, for the first time, the threat that segregation posed to international relations. After the war, many colonies in Asia and Africa gained their independence from European domination. At the same time, the Cold War struggle with the Communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) forced the United States to court the good will of these nations. Segregation undermined the nation’s ability to negotiate with these new nations while giving the USSR ammunition in its propaganda war against the United States. Leaders of the American foreign policy establishment urged an end to segregation at home as a way of fighting Communism abroad.

V

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

A

Social Challenges to Segregation

After the war, the push to end segregation began in earnest, led by NAACP lawyers, veterans, and social activists. Ironically, the first victory came not from lawyers or activists, but from the actions of a single white businessman. Since the 1880s major league baseball had banned black players. Because of this, black athletes played in the segregated Negro Leagues. That practice came to an end in 1945 when Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, concluded that segregation in major-league professional baseball was morally wrong. He also realized that it was politically indefensible in New York state and that integration might bring more fans to the ballpark. The same year, he signed Jackie Robinson, a brilliant athlete, who as an officer during the war had been acquitted in a court-martial for challenging illegal segregation on an army base. Robinson spent his first year playing for the Dodger minor league team in Montréal. He hit a home run in his first game and was an instant star. After one season in the minor leagues, he integrated the major leagues. A few other teams hired blacks, and by 1954 most teams had black players. A number of these black athletes—including Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron—became stars to white and black fans alike. If the national pastime could be integrated, it seemed only a matter of time before the nation’s schools, playgrounds, buses, and restaurants could also be integrated.

B

Legal Challenges to Segregation

Starting in the 1930s, a group of black attorneys had been fighting segregation through the courts. They were led by Charles Hamilton Houston, the vice dean at Howard University, and his student, Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the first black member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Joining them were other Howard graduates, like Spottswood William Robinson, III, a future federal judge, and Oliver W. Hill, who eventually became the first black member of the Richmond City Council in the 20th century and a leading civil rights attorney in Virginia. In Hollins v. Oklahoma (1935), Houston challenged the exclusion of blacks from juries. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of the defendant, ruling that jury exclusion was unconstitutional. The case was the first Supreme Court victory by an exclusively black counsel representing the NAACP. In 1939 the NAACP created a separate, nonprofit organization called the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to bring cases in state and federal courts that continually challenged segregation and racial discrimination.

After 1942 legal challenges to segregation were more successful; by that year, the Supreme Court had been radically remade by Franklin Roosevelt’s appointments. The justices disagreed with each other on many issues, but they generally agreed that racial discrimination was wrong. The court, which would eventually strike down all laws allowing segregation, began laying the groundwork for this change in the 1940s. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), the court ruled that it was unconstitutional for political parties to ban blacks from voting in primary elections where the candidates were chosen. Between 1946 and 1950, the court struck down segregation in interstate railroad trains, in state sponsored law schools, and in other graduate schools. In Sweat v. Painter (1950), the court ordered the University of Texas to integrate its law school. The court held that a new law school for blacks could never be equal to the established law school at the university.

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the court declared that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” This landmark decision broke the back of segregation. After Brown, the court gradually struck down all remaining forms of segregation. In Gayle v. Browder (1956), the Supreme Court silently overturned the Plessy precedent by holding that segregation was unconstitutional on public buses. This case grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott, which began when civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the court struck down laws banning interracial marriage. By 1968 all forms of de jure segregation had been declared unconstitutional.

C

Political Challenges to Segregation

During the 1960s demonstrators in the Civil Rights Movement protested segregation throughout the South and in many Northern cities. The protesters held rallies, boycotted segregated businesses, worked to register black voters, and marched to try to end Southern segregation. Organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were active throughout the South to try to rally people to challenge segregation.

Many demonstrators were beaten by police, and scores were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white terrorist organizations. Two important Southern civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated by opponents of integration. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the police conspired with local members of the KKK to murder three civil rights workers (two white and one black) and bury their bodies in a dam.

In response to the civil rights protests, Congress passed new and stronger civil rights laws in 1964, 1965, and 1968. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in public education, public accommodations and by employers or voter registrars. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended the use of voter-qualification tests such as literacy tests and later amendments to the act banned their use. The 1968 act outlawed racial discrimination in federally funded housing projects.

By the 1970s violence against civil rights workers had begun to dissipate in the South. Formal segregation was also gone. No governments maintained separate schools for blacks and whites, and separate facilities such as drinking fountains and restrooms had disappeared. Millions of blacks who had been disenfranchised could vote, and by the 1990s blacks held major public offices in the South, serving as mayors, governors, and state officials. Civil rights spread in the North as well, where blacks served as mayors of the three largest cities, and held high office in state and local government. At the national level, blacks served on the Supreme Court, in the House of Representatives and the Senate, in presidential cabinets, and as head of the joint chiefs of staff.

VI

DE FACTO SEGREGATION

Although de jure segregation was abolished by 1968, de facto segregation was still prevalent in most Northern and Southern cities. Blacks tended to live in all-black neighborhoods, often called ghettos. There were three main reasons for the formation of these neighborhoods. First, housing patterns were dictated by real estate agents, banks, and city zoning decisions. Often real estate agents would not show blacks homes in white neighborhoods while banks often refused to loan money to blacks moving into white neighborhoods. City planners often kept neighborhoods segregated through decisions on where to locate streets, interstate highways, access ramps to those highways, and even subway and other rail stations. Second, while formal segregation in schools disappeared, public officials often created school districts designed to keep blacks and whites separated. Finally, suburbanization also increased de facto segregation, as whites increasingly left the cities for suburban communities. In 1968 only two major American cities, Washington and Charleston, had black majorities. By 1990 more than 15 cities were predominantly black, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Richmond. Rather than live near blacks, or have their children attend schools with blacks, many whites moved away from the cities.

Economics and access to jobs compounded these race-conscious decisions by individuals and governments. Discrimination in hiring meant that blacks earned less than whites, and therefore had less money for housing. Thus, even where blacks had access to better housing, in integrated neighborhoods, most could not afford to move there. Also, many blacks chose to live in neighborhoods with other blacks, just as whites chose to live with other whites. Blacks who did integrate neighborhoods in both the North and the South often faced violence and intimidation.

Because students have traditionally attended schools in the neighborhoods where they live, most schools have remained segregated, not because the law required it, but because of where people lived. In the South, segregation was increased when whites removed their children from public schools when courts ordered integration. As a result, in Southern communities the public schools were legally integrated, but often only blacks attended them. Meanwhile, whites attended private schools.

Education was tied to job discrimination. Blacks had fewer educational opportunities than whites and thus were increasingly less able to compete in a changing job market that required greater skills and more training from workers. In the 1960s, and again in the 1990s urban riots shook major cities. Most experts argued that these riots resulted from frustration on the part of black youths, who saw little chance of finding meaningful work or even steady jobs. The social statistics on race were grim. In comparison with whites and Asian Americans, blacks lived shorter lives, had higher rates of infant mortality, were more likely to be unemployed, and had less chance of graduating high school or going to college.

VII

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The goal of civil rights activists from before the Civil War until the 1960s was to end legal discrimination, to achieve the ideal set out by Justice Harlan, that the “Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” By the late 1960s, this goal had been achieved. However, it did not lead to radical changes in the socioeconomic condition of blacks. To remedy this condition, blacks began to demand affirmative action as a way of increasing black participation in the economy and the society.

In a speech in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson articulated the rationale for affirmative action: “You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Thus, both President Johnson and President Richard M. Nixon established policies to guarantee that blacks and other minorities would in fact be hired by federal contractors. This led to various affirmative action programs to insure that blacks and other minorities had access to higher education and employment. These programs tried to encourage the hiring and promotion of minorities and women in order to counteract past and present discrimination. Affirmative action also included special educational programs and recruitment for these groups.

Affirmative action has been very controversial. Opponents call it reverse discrimination and argue that it gives a preference to people on the basis of their race. Supporters argue that past discrimination requires remedial measures and that without affirmative action blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities would have great difficulty moving into mainstream America.

VIII

CONCLUSION

In 1903 the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the single greatest issue of the 20th century would be the “color line.” He was to a great extent correct, both in terms of American domestic politics and events throughout the world. By the end of the century, de jure segregation in the United States had ended. Racial discrimination is illegal everywhere in the United States. In universities, businesses, the military, and the government, a few blacks are prominent and powerful. In 1988 the black leader Jesse Jackson made a serious bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination; in 1995 many Republicans hoped to see General Colin Powell become the presidential nominee. Clearly, much has changed in the nation. Yet, blacks remain among the poorest Americans, with the lowest chances for success. Opportunity seems unavailable for the majority of young blacks, even as a few are able to achieve great success. Finally, while segregation became illegal through the combined efforts of many individuals, some aspects of American society still remain segregated. Even though the laws no longer permitted discrimination and public policy seemed to favor integration, in the 1990s the nation remains racially polarized.