De Jure Segregation

Racial separation that is required by law is known as de jure segregation. The Supreme Court first approved of de jure segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), holding that legislatively mandated segregation in transportation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities were separate but equal. After Plessy, the fifteen former slave states, along with West Virginia and Oklahoma, mandated segregation in most public facilities, while other states allowed, but did not require, localities or state agencies to create de jure segregation (see Segregation, De Facto).

The Court also upheld segregation that did not purport to be “separate but equal.” In Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) the Court refused to interfere with a county school system that provided high school education for whites but not blacks, and in Berea College v. Kentucky (1908) the Court sustained a statute requiring private colleges to exclude blacks. In Gong Lum v. Rice (1927) the Court affirmed the right of Mississippi to segregate Chinese‐Americans from public schools set up for whites. Throughout the South, statutes segregated courtrooms, jails and prisons, restaurants, hotels, bars, trains and train stations, buses, streetcars, elevators, lunch counters, swimming pools, beaches, baseball fields, fishing holes, telephone booths, prizefights, pool halls, factories, public toilets, hospitals, cemeteries, and virtually all other places where blacks and whites might meet. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), one rare case that went against the trend of legitimizing segregation, the Court struck down a statute requiring segregation in residential neighborhoods (see Housing Discrimination).

Starting with Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Court began to require the integration of graduate and professional schools, on the theory that separate schools for blacks could never be equal. In Henderson v. United States (1950) the United States government joined black plaintiffs in convincing the Supreme Court that de jure segregation on interstate railroad dining cars was unconstitutional. This case, along with others forcing the integration of graduate and law schools, set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education (1954). There the Court held that in “the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” (p. 495). In Gayle v. Browder (1956) the Court silently overturned Plessy by upholding a declaratory judgment invalidating statutes requiring segregation on public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. This case stemmed from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which catapulted the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national fame. Within a decade the Court had applied this doctrine to all forms of statutorily mandated segregation. The last case to reach this result was Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down Virginia's antimiscegenation statute.

See also Race and Racism.

— Paul Finkelman