Claim: Segregation was mandated in the Jim Crow laws.

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States . Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures in the late nineteenth century after the Reconstruction period , these laws continued to be enforced until 1965 . They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America , starting in 1890 with a `` separate but equal '' status for African Americans in railroad cars . Public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War . This principle was extended to public facilities and transportation , including segregated cars on interstate trains and , later , buses . Facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to those which were then available to European Americans ; sometimes they did not exist at all . This body of law institutionalized a number of economic , educational , and social disadvantages . De jure segregation existed mainly in the Southern states , while Northern segregation was generally de facto -- patterns of housing segregation enforced by private covenants , bank lending practices , and job discrimination , including discriminatory labor union practices . `` Jim Crow '' was a pejorative expression meaning `` Negro '' .   Jim Crow laws -- sometimes , as in Florida , part of state constitutions -- mandated the segregation of public schools , public places , and public transportation , and the segregation of restrooms , restaurants , and drinking fountains for whites and blacks . The U.S. military was already segregated . President Woodrow Wilson initiated segregation of federal workplaces at the request of southern Cabinet members in 1913 .   These Jim Crow laws revived principles of the 1800 -- 1866 Black Codes , which had previously restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans . Segregation of public -LRB- state-sponsored -RRB- schools was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education . In some states it took years to implement this decision . Generally , the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , but years of action and court challenges have been needed to unravel the many means of institutional discrimination .