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Segregation
6 articles on Segregation
Segregation
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 5710 Includes: Laws Promoting Racial Separation | Social Conditions Promoting Racial Separation | Before the Civil War: Republicanism and Slavery Coexist | After the War: The Fight for Equality and Civil Rights Continues | Bibliography | Bibliography[This entry contains two subentries dealing with the racial separation of African Americans in the United States. The first article provides a discussion of the topic until 1830, including its definition and philosophical and religious origins, while the second article discusses the events, customs and laws related to segregation from the antebellum era to Plessy v. Ferguson.] Although the North American practice of racial separation was seeded during the colonial era, only in the century following the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) did the segregation of African Americans, as it is understood today, become entrenched. Segregation refers to the restriction of access on the basis of race to public facilities such as churches, hotels, and streetcars or the provision of separate accommodations for blacks and whites in public ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 3856 Includes: Plessy and Its Consequences. | Brown v. Board of Education and After. | BibliographySegregation (along with slavery and discrimination) is one of three major facets of white supremacy in American society. Racial, chattel slavery restricted the physical movements of individual blacks and the physical assemblage of blacks as groups. Controlling the spaces that people of African descent are allowed to occupy is the hallmark of segregation in North America. The northern colonies debated the function of slavery through the seventeenth century. This debate increased the commitment to racial segregation in these areas. Northern authorities created dozens of legal methods to maintain black social, political, and economic inferiority between 1740 and 1820, especially after the passage of gradual emancipation laws. Few American leaders advocated the acceptance of the black population as social and political equals. White Americans ...
Read full articleSegregation in Federal Government
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
For the first six decades of the twentieth century the U.S. federal government proved to be a defender of segregated race relations, both in its employment practices and through its programs. The District of Columbia as the seat of the federal government was itself thoroughly segregated by the end of World War I, including housing, education, prisons, hospitals, and cemeteries. Until 1964 black Americans encountered racial inequality frequently when dealing with their government: as employees in federal agencies, as inmates or officers in federal penitentiaries, as members of the armed services, as holders of federally guaranteed mortgages, or as visitors to national parks. In 1943 A. Philip Randolphdeclared that “the Negroes are in the position of having to fight their own Government… because the Government ...
Read full articleSegregation in the United States
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 4201 Includes: Segregation by Law | Opposition before World War II | Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement | Civil Rights Movement | De Facto Segregation | ConclusionLegal or social practice in the United States of separating people on the basis of their race. 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 practices, political acts, economic circumstances, or public policy result in the separation of people by race or ethnicity even though no laws require or authorize their separation. De facto segregation has continued even when state and federal civil rights laws have explicitly prohibited racial segregation.Segregation by law in the United States dates from the founding of the nation and was particularly ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to American Law
Word Count: 2442Race discrimination became embedded in American law with the emergence of slavery in the colonial period. Before the Revolution, some statutes singled out African Americans, even if free, for special punishments or special legal disabilities. However, a system of statutory segregation did not emerge until after the American Revolution. In the 1790s, public schools in New York, Boston, and other northern cities closed their doors to blacks. By the mid-nineteenth century, various private enterprises in the North and the South—steamboats, trains, inns, restaurants, theaters—either refused service to blacks or made them sit in separate areas. Meanwhile, in much of the North, and all of the South, public educational facilities were segregated by statute or custom.Blacks and white abolitionists challenged the decision ...
Read full articleSegregation, Racial
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1453 Includes: Segregation Imposed. | Segregation Challenged.the southern social, economic, and political system that enforced the separation of races from the post-Reconstruction era to the mid-twentieth century. Racial segregation was also called “Jim Crow,” an expression derived from the caricatured portrayal of blacks in antebellum minstrel shows. By the 1890s, however, “Jim Crow” had come to describe the segregation, social control, and political and economic subjugation of black people in the South. Upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and other decisions, segregation persisted until challenged by the anti-colonialist politics of World War II and the postwar civil rights movement.While C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) launched a debate over the origins and nature of racial segregation in the South, comparative studies ...
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