Segregation

Beginning in the late 1800s, nearly half of the States passed racial segregation laws. Segregation means the separation of one group from another. Most of those Jim Crow laws –laws that separate people on the basis of race-were aimed at African Americans. Some were also drawn to affect Mexican Americans, Asians, and Native Americans. These laws required segregation by race in the use of both public and private facilities: schools, parks and playgrounds, hotels and restaurants, streetcars, even public restrooms and drinking fountains.

Separate-but-Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court provided a constitutional basis for Jim Crow laws by creating the separate-but-equal doctrine. In Plessy v. Ferguson, it upheld a Louisiana law requiring segregation in rail coaches. The Court held that the law did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because the separate facilities provided for African Americans were equal to those provided for whites.

The separate-but-equal doctrine was soon applied in several other fields, and it stood for nearly 60 years. Indeed, until the late 1930s, little effort was made by any arm of government even to see that the separate accommodations for African Americans were, in fact, equal to those reserved to whites. More often than not, they were not.

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The Supreme Court first began to chip away at the separate-but-equal doctrine in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada in 1938. Lloyd Gaines, an African American, was denied admission to the law school at the all-white University of Missouri. Gaines was fully qualified for admission-except for his race. The State did not have a separate law school for African Americans. However, it did offer to pay his tuition at a public law school in any of the four neighboring States which did not discriminate by race. But Gaines insisted on a legal education in his home State.

The Court held that the separate-but-equal doctrine left Missouri with only two choices: It could either admit Gaines to the State’s law school or establish a separate-but-equal school for him. The State gave in and admitted Gaines.

Over the next several years, the Court began to insist on equality in fact between separate facilities. Thus, in 1950 the Court decided two major cases in line with its holding in Gaines, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma. G.W. McLaurin was admitted to the University of Oklahoma’s graduate school, but “on a segregated basis.” Both cases involved African American university students for whom the State had provided separate educational facilities. The Court held that, in both cases, the separate facilities were far from equal. Still, in neither case did the Court go so far as to reexamine the validity of the separate-but-equal doctrine.

Finally, in an historic decision in 1954, the Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, it struck down the laws of four States requiring or allowing separate public schools for white and African American students. (Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia. On the same day, it also struck down racially segregated public schools in the District of Columbia, under the 5th Amendment, Bolling v. Sharpe, 1954)

Unanimously, the Court held segregation by race in public education is invalid: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.
… To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone…. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” (Chief Justice Earl Warren, Opinion of the Court)

The Court in 1955 directed the States to make “a prompt and reasonable start” and to end segregation “with all deliberate speed.”

A “reasonable start” was made in Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis, and elsewhere. In most of the Deep South, however, “massive resistance” soon developed. State legislatures passed laws and school boards worked to block integration -the process of bringing a group into the mainstream of society. Most of these steps were clearly unconstitutional, but challenging them in court was both costly and slow.

The pace of desegregation quickened after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That act forbids the use of federal funds to aid any State or local activity in which racial segregation is practiced. It directed the Justice Department to file suits to prompt desegregation actions.
The Supreme Court quickened the pace in 1969. In a case from Mississippi, Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, it ruled that, after 15 years, the time for “all deliberate speed” had ended. Said a unanimous Court: “The continued operation of segregated schools under a standard allowing for ‘all deliberate speed’ … is no longer constitutionally permissible.”

De Jure, De Facto Segregation

By fall 1970, school systems characterized by de jure segregation had been abolished. De jure segregation is segregation by law, with legal sanction. That is not to say that desegregation had been fully accomplished-far from it. Some States, several school districts, and many parents and private groups have sought to avoid integrated schools through established or, often, newly created private schools. On the point, see the Court’s rulings in Runyon v. McCrary, 1976, page 570.

Many recent integration controversies have come in places where the schools have never been segregated by law. They have occurred, instead, in communities in which de facto segregation has long been present, and continues. De facto segregation is segregation in fact, even if no law requires it. Housing patterns have most often been its major cause. The concentration of African Americans in certain sections of cities inevitably led to local school systems in which some schools are largely African American. That condition is apparent in many northern as well as southern communities.

Efforts to desegregate those school systems have taken several forms. School district lines have been redrawn and the busing of students out of racially segregated neighborhoods has been tried. These efforts have brought strong protests in many places and violence in some.

The Supreme Court first sanctioned busing in a North Carolina case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971. There it held that “desegregation plans cannot be limited to walk-in schools.” Since then, busing has been used to increase the racial mix in many school districts across the country-in some by court order, in others, voluntarily.

Segregation in Other Fields

This nation has not yet achieved a complete integration of the public schools, but legally enforced racial segregation in all other areas of life has been eliminated. Many State and local laws have been repealed or struck down by the courts.

The Supreme Court has found segregation by race to be as unconstitutional in other areas as it is in public education. It has held that the Equal Protection Clause forbids segregation in: public swimming pools or other recreational facilities, Baltimore v. Dawson, 1955; local transportation, Gayle v. Browder, 1956; and State prisons and local jails, Lee v. Washington, 1968. The High Court struck down all State miscegenation laws (laws that forbid interracial marriages) in Loving v. Virginia, 1967. And it has held that race cannot be the basis for a child custody decision, Palmore v. Sidoti, 1984.