RACIAL SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES

'Racial segregation in the United States' is the history of racial segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines. The expression refers primarily to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from other races, but can more loosely refer to voluntary separation, and also to separation of other racial or ethnic minorities from the majority mainstream society and culture.
Racial segregation in the United States historically meant physical separation and provision of separate facilities (especially during the Jim Crow era), but it can also refer to certain other manifestations of racial discrimination such as separation of roles within an institution, such as the United States Armed Forces up to 1948 when black units were typically separated from white units but were led by white officers.
Racial segregation in the United States can be divided into ''de jure'' and ''de facto'' segregation. ''De jure'' segregation, sanctioned or enforced by force of law, was finally stopped by federal enforcement of a series of Supreme Court decisions beginning with ''Brown vs. Board of Education'' in 1954. The process of throwing off legal segregation in the United States lasted through much of the 1950s and 1960s when peaceful but massive civil rights demonstrations brought the morality of the laws to public attention. ''De facto'' segregation — segregation "in fact" — persists to varying degrees without sanction of law to the present day.

Contents

History

Separate but equal

National issues

Issues in the South

Issues in the North

De facto segregation

Unequal education

Prisons

Drug policy

See also

References

External links

History

After Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870 providing the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbidding racial discrimination in accommodations, Federal occupation troops in the South assured blacks the right to vote and to elect their own political leaders.
In order to discourage black voting, Southern Democrats resorted to violence. The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan terrorized black political leaders to counter the Republican party's power base. Many blacks were killed (often lynched) for attempting to exercise their right to vote, for political organization and for attending school. Thus segregation can be seen as a reaction against the growing political power of blacks in the South. After the so-called Compromise of 1877, all Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and Reconstruction ended. The Republican, bi-racial governments that had been formed previously collapsed. White Democrats ensured that African Americans were vitually excluded from voting or poltical office in the South. The end of Reconstruction also marked the onset of the Nadir of American race relations, when African-Americans both in the South and the North were increasingly oppressed by white mob violence and by de jure and de facto segregation.

Separate but equal

"Separate but Equal" was a phrase used by attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the Supreme Court litigation of ''Brown v. Board of Education'' in 1954, to refer to the phrase "equal but separate" used in the ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' case of 1896 as a custom of ''de jure'' racial segregation enacted into law. The NAACP, led by later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, was successful in challenging the constitutionality of ''Plessy'' and the Court voted to overturn the previous ruling.
After the American Civil War (1861–1865) brought about the end of slavery, ''Plessy'' became the de-facto standard throughout the southern United States, and represented the institutionalization of the segregation period. African Americans and European Americans would receive the same services (schools, hospitals, prisons, water fountains, bathrooms, etc.), but that there would be distinct facilities for each race. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African-Americans were almost always of lower quality than those reserved for whites; for example, most African-American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools.
The legitimacy of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of ''Plessy v. Ferguson'', '163 U.S. 537.' The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a key focus of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In ''Brown v. Board of Education'', '347 U.S. 483' (1954), the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the state level; the companion case of ''Bolling v. Sharpe'', '347 U.S. 497' outlawed such practices at the Federal level in the District of Columbia.

National issues

For much of the 20th century, it was a popular belief among many whites that the presence of blacks in a white neighborhood would bring down property values. The United States government created a policy to segregate the country which involved making low-interest mortgages available to white civilian families through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and to white military families through the Veteran's Administration. Black families were denied these loans because the planners behind this initiative labelled many black neighborhoods throughout the country "in decline." The rules for loans did not say that "black families cannot get loans"; rather, it said people from "areas in decline" could not get loans. While a case could be made that the wording did not appear to compel segregation, it tended to have that effect. And actually, this administration was formed as part of the New Deal to all Americans as well, and really just affected black residents of inner city areas; though most black families did in fact live in the inner city areas of big cities, and almost entirely occupied the inner city areas after World War II ended and whites began to move to new suburbs.
In addition to encouraging white families to move to suburbs by providing them loans to do so, the government uprooted many established African American communities by building elevated highways through their neighborhoods. In order to build a highway, tens of thousands of single-family homes were destroyed. Because these properties were summarily declared to be "in decline", families were given pittances for their properties, and were forced into federal housing called "the projects". In order to build these projects, still more single family homes were demolished.

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the segregation of the federal Civil Service.^[1] White and black people would sometimes be required to eat separately and use separate schools, public toilets, park benches, train and restaurant seating, etc. In some locales, in addition to segregated seating, it could be forbidden for stores or restaurants to serve different races under the same roof.

Segregation was also pervasive in housing. State constitutions (for example, that of California) had clauses giving local jurisdictions the right to regulate where members of certain races could live. White landowners often included restrictive covenants in deeds through which they prevented blacks or Asians from ever purchasing their property from any subsequent owner. In the 1948 case of ''Shelley v. Kraemer'', the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that such covenants were unenforceable in a court of law. However, residential segregation patterns had already become established in most American cities, and have often persisted up to the present (see white flight).
With the migration to the North of many black workers at the turn of the twentieth century, and the friction that occurred between white and black workers during this time, segregation was and continues to be a phenomenon in northern cities as well as in the South. Whites generally allocate tenements as housing to the poorest blacks. It would be well to remember, though, that while racism had to be legislated out of the South, many in the North, including Quakers and others who ran the Underground Railroad, were ideologically opposed to southerners' treatment of blacks. By the same token, many white southerners have a claim to closer relationships with blacks than wealthy northern whites, regardless of the latter's stated political persuasion.^[2]
Anti-miscegenation laws (also known as miscegenation laws) prohibited whites and non-whites from marrying each other. These state laws always targeted marriage between whites and blacks, and in some states also prohibited marriages between whites and Native Americans or
Asians. As one of many examples of such state laws, Utah's marriage law had an anti-miscegenation component that was passed in 1899 and repealed in 1963. It prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a Negro (Black American), mulatto (half black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black), "Mongolian" (East Asian), or member of the "Malay race" (a classification used to refer to Filipinos). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people who were not "white persons." (Utah Code, 40-1-2, C. L. 17, §2967 as amended by L. 39, C. 50; L. 41, Ch. 35.).
In World War I, blacks served in the United States Armed Forces in segregated units. Black soldiers were often poorly trained and equipped, and were often put on the frontlines in suicide missions. Still, the 93rd Division fought alongside the French . The 369th Infantry (formerly 15th New York National Guard) Regiment distinguished themselves, and were known as the "Harlem Hellfighters".^[3][4]
World War II saw the first black military pilots in the U.S., the Tuskegee Airmen, 99th Fighter Squadron,^[5] and also saw the segregated 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion participate in the liberation of Jewish survivors at Buchenwald.^[6] Despite the institutional policy of racially segregated training for enlisted members and in tactical units; Army policy dictated that black and white Soldiers would train together in officer candidate schools (beginning in 1942).^[7][8] Thus, the Officer Candidate School became the Army's first formal experiment with integration- with all Officer Candidates, regardless of race, living and training together.⁸
During World War II, 110,000 people of Japanese, descent (whether citizens or not) were placed in internment camps. Hundreds of people of German and Italian descent were also imprisoned. While the government program of Japanese American internment targeted all the Japanese in America as enemies, most German and Italian Americans were left in peace and were allowed to serve in the US army.
Pressure to end racial segregation in the government grew among African Americans and progressives after the end of World War II. On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the United States Armed Forces.
A law need not stipulate ''de jure'' segregation in order to have the effect of ''de facto'' segregation. For example, the eagle feather law, which governs the possession and religious use of eagle feathers, was officially written to protect then dwindling eagle populations while still protecting traditional Native American spiritual and religious customs, of which the use of eagles are central. The eagle feather law later met charges of promoting racial segregation due to the law’s provision authorizing the possession of eagle feathers to members of only one ethnic group, Native Americans, and forbidding Native Americans from including non-Native Americans in indigenous customs involving eagle feathers—a common modern practice dating back to the early 1500s.
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 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 trustee system and flagrant inmate abuse at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi. In 1972 federal judge, 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 allow certain inmates to have power and control over others, was also abolished.^[9]
More recently, the disparity between the racial compositions of inmates in the American prison system has led to claims that the U.S. Justice system furthers a "new apartheid".^[10]

Issues in the South

After the end of Reconstruction, which followed from the Compromise of 1877, many state laws were instituted by the new Democratic governments in the South to separate the black and white racial groups in order to submit African-Americans to de facto second-class citizenship and thus enforce white supremacy. Collectively, these state laws were known as the Jim Crow system, after the name of a stereotypical 1830s black minstrel show character.^[11]
Racial segregation became the law in most parts of the American South until the American Civil Rights Movement. These laws, known as Jim Crow laws were similar to apartheid legislation in the forced segregation of facilities and services to African Americans and White Americans, and prohibition of intermarriage. Some similarities between the situation in the Southern United States and South Africa under Apartheid were:

★ The races were kept separate, with 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. (See List of Jim Crow laws in the South from NPS.gov.)

★ In South Africa, marriage between whites and non-whites was banned during Apartheid. In America, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage ("miscegenation") had been enforced throughout the South and in many Northern states since the Colonial era. During Reconstruction, such laws were repealed in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina. In all these states such laws were reinstated after the Democratic "Redeemers" came to power. The Supreme Court declared such laws constitutional in 1883. This verdict was overturned only in 1967 by Loving v. Virginia. ^[12]

★ The voting rights of blacks were systematically restricted or denied through suffrage laws, such as the introduction of poll taxes 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. Only whites could vote in the Democratic Party primary contests.^[12]
Some differences were:

★ In the United States after the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), there was never a class of blacks who were not citizens (although it is certain that most were treated as second class citizens);

★ There were no "homelands" in the United States (although some areas were informally designated black neighborhoods, and as such were under-resourced and stigmatized), and families were not separated as they were in South Africa by not allowing men to bring their families with them to the areas where they worked.

★ Blacks are a minority in the United States, but a majority in South Africa.

★ In South Africa, voting rights were denied to blacks outright, by denying them citizenship. In the United States, denial of voting rights was enforced by local custom, by lynching and other forms of violence, or by poll taxes and selective enforcement of literacy requirements as described above.

The term genocide not only means mass killing of a group, but also the intention to destroy a group of people. It is often used to describe the Holocaust. The Jim Crow laws were designed to disempower African Americans and characterized them as an inferior race, just as the Third Reich deemed Jewish people. The Jim Crow laws justified and perpetuated the use of lynching against African Americans, particularly by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.The Ku Klux Klan terrorised Southern America.
The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) made a 1951 presentation on lynching in the United States to the United Nations entitled "We Charge Genocide," which argued that the federal government of the United States, by its failure to act to curb the lynchings, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.
In 1963, George Wallace in his inaugural address as governor of Alabama held to a strong segregationist position. Referring to Alabama as "this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland" and accusing the integrationist of imposing a "tyranny" on the South, he declared his support for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Issues in the North

Although formal segregation did not exist in the North and facilities were not segregated, the North contained elements of de facto racism. Certain neighborhoods may be restricted to blacks and job opportunities were 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 were able to live without the same degree of oppression experienced in the South.
^[14]
While it is commonly thought that segregation was a southern phenomenon, segregation was also to be found in "the North". The Chicago suburb of Cicero for example, was made famous when Civil Rights advocate Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march advocating open (race-unbiased) housing.
^[14]
Race-based legislation in the North 1807 - 1850 - PBS Series - Africans in America (2007)

De facto segregation

Though de jure segregation was abolished in the United States in the 1960s it still continues on a de facto basis in many cities where African-Americans, particularly poorer ones, tend to live in all or mostly black neighborhoods while white Americans tend to live in largely white suburbs. The desire of many whites to avoid having their children attend integrated schools has been a factor in this so-called "white flight" to the suburbs. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761580651_3/Segregation_in_the_United_States.html#s15

Unequal education

The claim of "American apartheid" has also 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.^[16] Jonathan Kozol covered these issues in depth in an article for ''Harper's Magazine'' entitled "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid." Kozol wrote:

Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.

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. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become.^[17]

Kozol expanded on this topic in his book ''The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.''
The "New American apartheid" refers to the allegation that US drug and criminal policies in practice target blacks on the basis of race. The radical left-wing web-magazine Z-Net 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.^[18]

This article has been discussed at The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and by several school boards attempting to address the issue of continued segregation.

Prisons

Permanent racial segregation was banned in prisons in 1968 however California continued to engage in the practice on a temporary basis during the first sixty days of incarceration and during prison transfer.http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/03/Worldandnation/Prison_segregation_de.shtml This was the subject of a 2004 case brought before the United States Supreme Court when inmate Garrison Johnson challenged California's prison segregation in Johnson v. California, 03-636.http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-11-02-prison-racial-segration_x.htm?csp=36 http://www.law.duke.edu/publiclaw/supremecourtonline/certGrants/2004/johvcal
On February 23, 2005, the court ruled that the practice must end.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46810-2005Feb23.html

Drug policy

The United States' drug policy is accused by many anti-drug war crimonologists as "the new American Apartheid." According to Noam Chomsky, "African Americans, now a majority of prisoners for the first time in US history, are imprisoned at well over seven times the rate of whites—completely out of the range of arrests, which themselves target Blacks far out of proportion to their involvement in drug use or trafficking."

See also

★ American Civil Rights Movement (1896-1954)

★ American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)

★ Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement

★ Civil rights

★ List of anti-discrimination acts

★ African-American history

★ Black history

★ Desegregation

★ Baseball color line

★ Discrimination

★ Ethnopluralism

★ Separate but equal

★ Jim Crow laws

★ List of segregationists during the American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)

★ Mortgage Discrimination

★ Race and longevity

★ Race legislation in the United States

★ Racial segregation

★ Racism

★ Redlining

★ Second-class citizen

★ Apartheid

★ Black Belt (region of Chicago)

References

1. "Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson" W.E.B. DuBois, September, 1913
2. History of Residential Segregation
3. "Detached Service By Segregated Infantry Units"
4. "James Reese Europe and The Harlem Hellfighters Band" by Glenn Watkins
5. "On Clipped Wings - As America's first black military pilots, Tuskegee airmen faced a battle against racism" by Keith Weldon Medley
6. "William A. Scott, III and the Holocaust: The Encounter of African American Liberators and Jewish Survivors at Buchenwald" by Asa R. Gordon, Executive Director, Douglass Institute of Government
7. ''Women's Army Corps'' Chapter I "The Women's Army Corps, 1942-1945"
8. ''Integration of the Armed Forces: 1940-1965'' CHAPTER 2 "World War II: The Army"
9. Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
10. ZMag: "The New American Apartheid"
11. Remembering Jim Crow - Minnesota Public Radio
12. The History of Jim Crow
13. The History of Jim Crow
14. "Africans in America" - PBS Series - Part 4 (2007)
15. "Africans in America" - PBS Series - Part 4 (2007)
16. Singer, Alan. ''American Apartheid: Race and the Politics of School Finance on Long Island, NY.''
17. Kozol, John. Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid. Harper's Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005
18. Shelden, Randall G.
and William B. Brown. The New American Apartheid

External links

★ "Remembering Jim Crow" - Minnesota Public Radio (multi-media)

★ "Africans in America" - PBS 4-Part Series

★ Black History Collection

★ "Slavery and the Making of America" - PBS - WNET, New York (4-Part Series)