Rather than through de jure segregation, most northern whites and blacks lived in separate neighborhoods and attended separate schools largely through de facto segregation. This kind of segregation resulted from the fact that African Americans resided in distinct neighborhoods, stemming from insufficient income as well as a desire to live among their own people, as many ethnic groups did. However, blacks separated themselves not merely as a matter of choice or custom.
Instead, realtors and landlords steered blacks away from white neighborhoods and municipal ordinances and judicially enforced racial covenants signed by homeowners kept blacks out of white areas. In , the federal government sanctioned racial segregation, fashioning the constitutional rationale for keeping the races legally apart.
In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson was based upon a belief in white supremacy. In its decision the majority of the court concluded that civil rights laws could not change racial destiny. Local and state authorities never funded black education equally nor did African Americans have equal access to public accommodations.
To make matters worse, In the South segregation prevailed unabated from the s to the s. For the next fifty years racial segregation prevailed, reinforced by disfranchisement, official coercion, and vigilante terror. In addition, starting in with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who had close ties to the South, the federal government imposed racial segregation in government offices in Washington, D.
Roosevelt in the s. The struggle against Nazi racism in Europe called attention to racism in America. The war had exposed the horrors of Nazi racism; non-white nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia struggled to end colonial rule ; and scientists no longer accepted the notion of superior and inferior races.
In , President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces, thus reversing a longstanding practice. In , the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. Nevertheless, the Brown ruling signaled only a first step, and it took another decade and a mass movement for civil rights for African Americans to tear down the racist edifices of segregation in the South. The challenge is to explain to students the reasons for and the legacy of segregation. Explaining segregation to students is a lot more difficult because of the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement.
Now that an African American has been elected president of the United States, segregation seems as outmoded and distant a practice as watching black and white television.
Thus, the major challenge is to explain to students the reasons for and the legacy of segregation. This requires a series of questions.
The first question to ask is when did racial segregation begin? The importance of this question helps in gauging the potency and endurance of racism as a feature of American history. If segregation began Students should understand that segregation is embedded deeply in America's past.
The evidence points in this direction. Before the Civil War, free Negroes in the North encountered segregation in schools, public accommodations, and the military. In , the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in Roberts v. City of Boston held that the state could require separate and equal schools for Negroes without violating the right of equality in the Massachusetts Constitution.
Segregation continued to exist after the Civil War and spread to the South once slaves were emancipated. Still, it is one thing to confirm that segregation Students should understand the role the federal government played in establishing and dismantling segregation. What seems unique about race relations from the s to the early s was its porousness: segregation was not as rigid then as it later became. Moreover, blacks still had the right to vote and could wield influence in public affairs.
The overarching purpose of Jim Crow laws was to prevent contact between black people and white people as equals, establishing white people as above black people. During the ensuing years, states passed laws instituting requirements for separate and equal accommodations for blacks on public modes of transportation. Black people also had separate schools, hospitals, churches, cemeteries, restrooms, and prisons, and these facilities were usually inferior to facilities for white people, although the laws called for the separate facilities to be of equal quality.
Jim Crow laws also influenced social interactions between blacks and whites. Failure to enforce these laws resulted in fines or imprisonment. Into the 20th century, Jim Crow laws continued to govern everyday life in America, prohibiting black and white interaction. For instance, in the state of Georgia, blacks and whites had to use separate parks. Blacks and whites could not play checkers together in Birmingham, Alabama, under a law. In , journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that "no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.
Keeping whites and blacks from sitting together on a bus, train, or trolley car might seem insignificant, but it was one more link in a system of segregation that had to be defended at all times — lest it collapse.
Thus transit was a logical point of attack for the foes of segregation, in the courtroom and on the buses themselves. It would take several decades of legal action and months of nonviolent direct action before these efforts achieved their intended result.
In , as part of Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court found such zoning to be unconstitutional because it interfered with property rights of owners.
Using loopholes in that ruling in the s, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover created a federal zoning committee to persuade local boards to pass rules preventing lower-income families from moving into middle-income neighborhoods, an effort that targeted Black families.
Richmond, Virginia, decreed that people were barred from residency on any block where they could not legally marry the majority of residents. During the Great Migration , a period between and , six million African Americans left the South. Huge numbers moved northeast and reported discrimination and segregation similar to what they had experienced in the South. Segregated schools and neighborhoods existed, and even after World War II , Black activists reported hostile reactions when Black people attempted to move into white neighborhoods.
Only a small portion of houses was built for Black families, and those were limited to segregated Black communities. In some cities, previously integrated communities were torn down by the PWA and replaced by segregated projects. The reason given for the policy was that Black families would bring down property values.
This kind of mapping concentrated poverty as mostly Black residents in red-lined neighborhoods had no access or only very expensive access to loans. The practice did not begin to end until the s. In , the Supreme Court ruled that a Black family had the right to move into their newly-purchased home in a quiet neighborhood in St.
Kramer, attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP , led by Thurgood Marshall , argued that allowing such white-only real estate covenants were not only morally wrong, but strategically misguided in a time when the country was trying to promote a unified, anti-Soviet agenda under President Harry Truman.
Civil rights activists saw the landmark case as an example of how to start to undo trappings of segregation at the federal level. But while the Supreme Court ruled that white-only covenants were not enforceable, the real estate playing field was hardly leveled. The act subsidized housing for whites only, even stipulating that Black families could not purchase the houses even on resale. The program effectively resulted in the government funding white flight from cities. One of the most notorious of the white-only communities created by the Housing Act was Levittown, New York, built in and followed by other Levittowns in different locations.
Segregation of children in public schools was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in with Brown v.
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