Racial segregation in the United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
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 and throughout the 1940s when "Negro" 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 unjust laws to public attention. De facto segregation—segregation "in fact"—persists to varying degrees without sanction of law to the present day.
Contents |
[edit] Separate but equal
"Separate but Equal" was a phrase used by attorneys for the NAACP during the Supreme Court litigation of Brown v. Board of Education (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 institionalization of the segregation period. African-Americans and European-Americans would receive the same services (schools, hospitals, 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.
[edit] 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 Association (FHA) and to white military families through the Veteran's Administration. Black families were denied these loans because the planners behind this initiative labeled 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" cannot get loans. While a case could be made that the wording did not appear to compel segregation that was its effect.
In addition to encouraging white families to move to suburbs by providing them loans to do so, the government savagely 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 the towering monstrosities that are "the projects", even more single family homes were demolished.
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".[1]
[edit] Issues in the North
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.
[edit] Issues in the South
Racial segregation was the law in parts of the American South until the American Civil Rights Movement. These laws became known as Jim Crow laws and 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 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 [2].)
- Laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage (miscegenation) were passed between 1870 and 1884 in eleven southern states [3]
- 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. [4]
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 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."
