page_title: Racial segregation
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Racial segregation / Historic cases from 10,000 BC to the 1960s / Other cases / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: Sign on a restaurant: "We Cater to White Trade only.", taken in Lancaster, Ohio
context_page_description: Racial segregation is the systemic separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation can amount to the international crime of apartheid and a crime against humanity under the Statute of the International Criminal Court. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races. Specifically, it may be applied to activities such as eating in restaurants, drinking from water fountains, using public toilets, attending schools, going to movies, riding buses, renting or purchasing homes or renting hotel rooms. In addition, segregation often allows close contact between members of different racial or ethnic groups in hierarchical situations, such as allowing a person of one race to work as a servant for a member of another race.
  Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination.
context_section_description: After the passage of Jim Crow laws which segregated African Americans and Whites, the people who were negatively affected by those laws saw no progress in their quest for equality. Racial segregation was not a new phenomenon, as illustrated by the fact that almost four million blacks had been enslaved before the Civil War. The laws passed segregated African Americans from Whites in order to enforce a system of white supremacy. Signs were used to show non whites where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat. For those places that were racially mixed, blacks had to wait until all White customers were dealt with. Rules were also enforced that restricted African Americans from entering white stores. Segregated facilities extended from white only schools to white only graveyards.
  After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in America, racial discrimination became regulated by the so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated strict segregation of the races. Though many such laws were instituted shortly after fighting ended, they only became formalized after the 1877 end of the Reconstruction period. The period that followed is known as the nadir of American race relations. The legislation (or in some states, such as Florida, the state constitutions) that mandated segregation lasted at least until a 1968 ruling by the Supreme Court outlawing all forms of segregation.
  While the U.S. Supreme Court majority in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case explicitly permitted "separate but equal" facilities (specifically, transportation facilities), Justice John Marshall Harlan, in his dissent, protested that the decision was an expression of white supremacy; he predicted that segregation would "stimulate aggressions … upon the admitted rights of colored citizens", "arouse race hate", and "perpetuate a feeling of distrust between [the] races. Feelings between whites and blacks were so tense, even the jails were segregated."
  Elected in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson tolerated the extension of segregation throughout the federal government that was already underway.  In World War I, blacks were drafted and served in the United States Army in segregated units. Black combat soldiers were often poorly trained and equipped, and new draftees were put on the front lines in dangerous missions. The U.S. military was still heavily segregated in World War II. The air force and the marines had no blacks enlisted in their ranks. There were blacks in the Navy Seabees. The army had only five African-American officers. In addition, no African-American would receive the Medal of Honor during the war, and their tasks in the war were largely reserved to noncombat units. Black soldiers had to sometimes give up their seats in trains to the Nazi prisoners of war.
  A club central to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City was a whites-only establishment, with blacks (such as Duke Ellington) allowed to perform, but to a white audience. In the reception to honor his 1936 Olympic success, Jesse Owens was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria New York and instead forced to travel up to the event in a freight elevator. The first black Oscar recipient Hattie McDaniel was not permitted to attend the premiere of Gone with the Wind with Georgia being racially segregated, and at the Oscars ceremony at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles she was required to sit at a segregated table at the far wall of the room; the hotel had a no-blacks policy, but allowed McDaniel in as a favor. Her final wish to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery was denied because the graveyard was restricted to whites only.
  On September 11, 1964, John Lennon announced The Beatles would not play to a segregated audience in Jacksonville, Florida. City officials relented following this announcement.  A contract for a 1965 Beatles concert at the Cow Palace in California specifies that the band "not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience".
  American sports were racially segregated until the mid-twentieth century. In baseb
caption: "We Cater to White Trade Only" sign on a restaurant window in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938. In 1964 Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and spent a night in jail for attempting to eat at a white-only restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida
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