What was 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. This changed in the s, and teachers should make clear the decisive role of the federal government in contributing to the establishment of hardcore segregation in the South.

Thus, Jim Crow did not come about just through individual acts of prejudice but required government intervention from the North as well as the South.

Without the official Students should understand that Jim Crow was not simply a matter of individual acts of prejudice. It required government sanction. Despite complicity from the North, the harshest and most long-lasting forms of segregation occurred in the South.

Why were white southerners so adamant in maintaining segregation? Students should come Segregation was intended to enforce and underscore the subordinate position of blacks in American society. Southern whites considered this system of vital importance because of the vast majority of African Americans lived in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separate was never equal nor was it meant to be. Segregation was intended to debase African Americans, strip them of their dignity, reinforce their inequality, and maintain a submissive agricultural labor force.

In this way, you can point out to students that the southern United States from the s through the s was similar in many ways to South Africa during its Apartheid Era. White men established segregation to keep black men from having sexual relations with white women. Viewing miscegenation as the ultimate threat to the perpetuation of their superior racial stock, they often resorted to lynching black men for allegedly raping white women.

In doing so, white men not only reinforced their control over blacks but also white women. They sought to maintain the virtue and chastity of their wives and daughters, reinforcing their patriarchal roles as husband, father, and ultimately guardian of their communities.

However, it can be debated whether the real issue was sexual purity or power, for many white southern men both during slavery and Jim Crow actively pursued clandestine sexual relations with black women,. Segregation grew out of fear and a desire to control. Nevertheless, this fear of miscegenation, whether real or imagined, reinforced Jim Crow. White southerners were adamant about maintaining school segregation, particularly in the early grades, because they did not want little white girls to socialize with black boys, which might lead to more intimate relations as they turned into teenagers and young adults.

Woolworth store, Greensboro, North Carolina, site of lunch counter sit-in. This is, unfortunately, not a surprising account of North Carolina, or of the South more generally.

The South of the s was the land of fire hoses aimed at black people who dared protest Jim Crow laws. Today, schools in the South are almost as segregated as they were when Sevone Rhymes was a child. Walk around in the Atlanta or the Charlotte of the late s, and you might see black people in restaurants, hotels, the theater, Foner said.

Two decades later, such things were not allowed. This amorphous period of race relations in the South was first described by the historian C. Vann Woodward, who wrote in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow , that segregation in the South did not become rigid with the end of slavery, but instead, around the turn of the century.

During that time, Foner said, black residents could could sue companies for discriminating against them—and win their lawsuits. Blacks could also legally vote in most places disenfranchisement laws did not arrive in earnest until about , and were often allied with poor whites in the voting booth.

This alliance was strong enough to control states like North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia at various points throughout the late 19th century.

This alliance was doomed. White elites, cast out of power and facing policies that threatened their economic hold on the state, launched a campaign that they knew would drive black and whites apart.

It was this campaign that tried to re-enforce the idea of black people as different, as lesser, and as a race that had to be separate from whites. Segregation was created in the South during this time period, and many of the ideas that drove it still exist more than a century later in the South of today. Neighborhoods were not divided by class—business owners lived next door to workers—or by race—blacks and whites lived on the same block, he found. On the College Street of , for example, the black renter Ben Smith lived next to white bookkeeper Thomas Tiddy and white cotton merchant T.

Black and white farmers were forced into sharecropping, which kept them mired in poverty. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the worst incidents of anti-integration happened in The state had passed the Elimination of Racial Balance law in , but it had been held up in court by Irish Catholic opposition.

Police protected the Black students as several days of violence broke out between police and Southie residents. White crowds greeted the buses with insults, and further violence erupted between Southie residents and retaliating Roxbury crowds. State troopers were called in until the violence subsided after a few weeks. Segregation persists in the 21st Century. Studies show that while the public overwhelmingly supports integrated schools, only a third of Americans want federal government intervention to enforce it.

The phenomenon reflects residential segregation in cities and communities across the country, which is not created by overtly racial laws, but by local ordinances that target minorities disproportionately. Kendi , published by Bodley Head. Eaton by the New Press. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. When Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of , it authorized what was then the largest public works program in U.

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