page_title: Racial segregation in the United States
section_title: Racism
hierarchical_section_title: Racial segregation in the United States / Racism
caption_attribution_description: Description: "Colored Waiting Room" sign from segregationist era United States. Medium: Black-and-white en:photograph Location: Greyhound bus station[1], Rome GA, United States Date: September 1943 Author: Esther Bubley Source: Library of Congress Provider: "Images of American Political History" at the College of New Jersey [2] License: Public domain Misc: Borders cropped with GIMP
context_page_description: Racial segregation in the United States is the segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation in the United States along racial lines. The term mainly refers to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from European Americans, but it is also used with regard to the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as the separation of roles within an institution. Notably, in the United States Armed Forces up until 1948, black units were typically separated from white units but were nevertheless still led by white officers.
  Signs were used to indicate where African Americans could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat. Segregated facilities extended from white-only schools to white-only graveyards. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, so long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided, a requirement that was rarely met in practice.
context_section_description: For much of the 20th century, it was a popular belief among many whites that the presence of blacks in white neighborhoods would bring down property values. The United States government began making low-interest mortgages available to families through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veteran's Administration. Black families were legally entitled to these loans but they were sometimes denied these loans because the planners who were behind this initiative labeled many black neighborhoods throughout the country as being "in decline". The rules for loans did not say that "black families cannot get loans"; rather, they said that people who were from "areas in decline" could not get loans. While a case could be made that the wording did not appear to compel segregation, it tended to have that effect. In fact, this administration was formed as part of the New Deal for all Americans but it mostly affected black residents of inner city areas; most black families did in fact live in the inner city areas of large cities and they almost entirely occupied these areas after the end of World War II when whites began to move to new suburbs.
  In addition to encouraging white families to move into suburbs by granting them loans which enabled them to do so, the government uprooted many established African American communities by building elevated highways through their neighborhoods. In order to build these elevated highways, the government destroyed tens of thousands of single-family homes. Because these properties were summarily declared to be "in decline," families were given pittances for their properties, and forced to move into federally-funded  housing which was called "the projects". To build these projects, still more single family homes were demolished.
  President Woodrow Wilson did not oppose segregation practices by autonomous department heads of the federal Civil Service, according to Brian J. Cook in his work, Democracy And Administration: Woodrow Wilson's Ideas And The Challenges Of Public Management. White and black people would sometimes be required to eat separately, go to separate schools, use separate public toilets, park benches, train, buses, and water fountains, etc. In some locales, in addition to segregated seating, it could be forbidden for stores or restaurants to serve different races under the same roof.
  Public segregation was challenged by individual citizens on rare occasions but had minimal impact on civil rights issues, until December, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to be moved to the back of a bus for a white passenger. Parks' civil disobedience had the effect of sparking the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks' act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. 
  Segregation was also pervasive in housing. State constitutions (for example, that of California) had clauses giving local jurisdictions the right to regulate where members of certain races could live. In 1917, the Supreme Court in the case of Buchanan v. Warley declared municipal resident segregation ordinances unconstitutional. In response, whites resorted to the restrictive covenant, a formal deed restriction binding white property owners in a given neighborhood not to sell to blacks. Whites who broke these agreements could be sued by "damaged" neighbors. In the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that such covenants were unenforceable in a court of law. However, residential segregation patterns had already become established in most American cities, and have often persisted up to the present from the impact of white flight and Redlining).
  In most cities, the only way blacks could relieve the pressure of crowding that resulted from increasing migration was to expand residential borders into surrounding previously white neighborhoods, a process that often resulted in harassment and attacks by white residents whose intolerant attitudes were intensified by fears that black neighbors wou
caption: Sign for "colored" waiting room at a Greyhound bus terminal in Rome, Georgia, 1943
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