Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the
racial segregation or
hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along
racial lines. The expression refers primarily to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from other races, but can more loosely refer to voluntary separation, and also to separation of other racial or
ethnic minorities from the majority mainstream society and communities.
Racial segregation in the United States has meant the physical separation and provision of separate facilities (especially during the
Jim Crow era), but it can also refer to other manifestations of
racial discrimination such as separation of roles within an institution, such as the
United States Armed Forces up to the 1950s when
black units were typically separated from white units but were led by white officers.
Racial segregation in the United States can be divided into
de jure and
de facto segregation.
De jure segregation, sanctioned or enforced by force of law, was stopped by federal enforcement of a series of
Supreme Court decisions after with
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The process of throwing off legal segregation in the United States lasted through much of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when
civil rights demonstrations resulted in public opinion turning against enforced segregation.
De facto segregation — segregation "in fact" —...
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