Separate but equal

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For the film about the Brown v. Board of Education trial, see Separate But Equal (film).
A restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938.
A restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938.
An African-American youth at a drinking fountain in Halifax, North Carolina, in 1938.
An African-American youth at a drinking fountain in Halifax, North Carolina, in 1938.
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Separate but equal is a set phrase denoting the system of segregation that justifies giving different groups of people separate facilities or services with the declaration that the quality of each group's public facilities remain equal.

The phrase has also recently been used in debate over same-sex partnerships.

[edit] United States

The American Civil War (1861–1865) policy yielded the cessation of most legal slavery in the U.S., upon which the separate but equal laws became officially established throughout the United States and represented the institutionalization of the segregation period. Blacks were entitled to receive the same public services such as schools, bathrooms, and water fountains,but the 'separate but equal' doctrine mandated different facilities for the two groups. 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 facilities and social services exclusive to African-Americans were of lower quality than those reserved for whites; for example, many African-American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools.

The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a key focus of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), attorneys for the NAACP referred to the phrase "equal but separate" used in Plessy v. Ferguson as a custom de jure racial segregation enacted into law. The NAACP, led by the soon-to-be first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, was successful in challenging the constitutional viability of the separate but equal doctrine, and the court voted to overturn sixty years of law that had developed under Plessy. 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. In 1967 under Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage ("anti-miscegenation laws") in the United States.

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Types of Segregation
Religious segregation
Ethnic segregation
Gender segregation
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