Racial Segregation in The United States - Separate But Equal

Separate But Equal

The legitimacy of laws requiring segregation of blacks was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. The Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute that required railroad companies to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for white and black passengers and prohibited whites and blacks from using railroad cars that were not assigned to their race.

Plessy thus allowed segregation, which became standard throughout the southern United States, and represented the institutionalization of the Jim Crow period. Everyone, theoretically, would receive the same public services (schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.), but that there would be separate 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. Segregation was never mandated by law in the northern states, but a "de facto" system grew up for schools, in which nearly all black students attended schools that were nearly all-black. In the South, white schools had no black pupils or teachers, while the black schools had black teachers and no white students.

Some streetcar companies did not segregate voluntarily. It took 15 years for the government to break down their resistance.

On at least six separate occasions, spanning a time period of nearly 60 years, the United States Supreme Court held, either explicitly or by necessary implication, that the “separate but equal” rule announced in Plessy was the correct rule of law, although, toward the end of that time period, the Court began to focus on whether the separate facilities were in fact equal.

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 Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all state and local laws requiring segregation.