v., -gat·ed, -gat·ing, -gates.

v.tr.

1. To abolish or eliminate segregation in.
2. To open (a school or workplace, for example) to members of all races or ethnic groups, especially by force of law.

v.intr.

To become open to members of all races or ethnic groups.

desegregation de·seg're·ga'tion n.
desegregationist de·seg're·ga'tion·ist n.

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verb

To open to all people regardless of race: integrate. See include/exclude, same/different/compare.

Efforts to eliminate the legally required separation of the races in schools, housing, transportation, and other public accommodations began almost as soon as segregation laws were enacted. The Supreme Court upheld a law requiring railroads to provide separate facilities for whites and African Americans in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), holding that the Constitution was not violated by laws requiring facilities that, though separate, were equal. In 1915 the Court indicated that it stood ready to enforce the requirement of equality. But Missouri Ex Rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first case in which a state's segregation law was declared unconstitutional because it failed to ensure that African Americans had access to facilities equal to those available to whites.

In a series of cases involving state universities culminating in Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the Supreme Court held that the facilities at issue were not in fact equal. The states could have responded by investing more money in the separate schools to make them equal. But states faced with court orders found the cost of upgrading too high, and they eliminated their rules barring the enrollment of African Americans in their universities.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) repudiated the idea that separate facilities, at least in education, could ever be equal. The Court's 1955 decision on the appropriate remedy in Brown blurred the distinction between desegregation, meaning the elimination of laws requiring the separation of the races, and integration, meaning a state of affairs in which all races were in fact present in every school or public accommodation. Laws requiring segregation could have been replaced by rules assigning students to schools without regard to race, for example, by assigning all students to their neighborhood schools. The Court, however, required that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed," suggesting that the goal was integration, a far more difficult accomplishment.

Brown and the emerging civil rights movement extended the challenge to legally required segregation beyond the schools to the South's entire Jim Crow system. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 was aimed at desegregating the city's bus system, whose rules required African Americans to sit in the back of the bus and give up their seats when whites demanded them. The Supreme Court repeatedly held that all forms of segregation were unconstitutional, usually in short opinions that simply referred to Brown.

Southern resistance to desegregation persisted, and civil rights activists shifted their attention from the courts to the streets. In February 1960 four students in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to the food counter of their local Woolworth's department store and requested service. Remaining after service was denied, they sparked a series of sit-ins at other segregated public accommodations. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored Freedom Rides, in which African Americans boarded interstate buses in the North and refused to comply with segregation laws when the buses crossed into the South. Civil rights activism prompted violent responses from southern defenders of segregation. Freedom Riders were beaten in bus stations while local police officers watched.

The civil rights mobilization of the early 1960s prodded Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Relying on congressional power to regulate interstate commerce, the Civil Rights Act required nondiscrimination in all places of public accommodation, which included essentially all the nation's restaurants, hotels, and theaters. The act also denied federal funds to school systems that continued to maintain segregated systems. This financial threat led to a rapid increase in the pace of desegregation in the Deep South.

As laws requiring segregated facilities fell, attention turned to de facto segregation, the separation of the races despite the absence of any legal requirement. Schools in the urban North were often segregated in that sense. No state law required separate facilities, but widespread patterns of residential segregation, usually based on historic patterns and differences in the ability of whites and African Americans to afford housing in affluent areas, produced schools that were racially identifiable as white or African American.

In Green v. School Board of New Kent County (1968), a case involving a school system that had been segregated by law in 1954, the Supreme Court said the Constitution required neither white schools nor black schools "but just schools." Applied in northern settings, that holding would have required substantial alterations in existing practices. Resistance to expansive efforts to achieve integration grew as the desegregation effort moved north. The Supreme Court never endorsed the idea that the Constitution required the elimination of de facto segregation, although it was creative in finding that some northern districts had actually imposed segregation by law.

Through the 1990s the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that allowed formerly segregated school systems to remove themselves from judicial supervision. No laws remained that required the separation of the races. The Civil Rights Act and other statutes had effectively eliminated separation in most places of public accommodation, although discrimination persisted. In those senses desegregation had been achieved. The broader goal of integration remained unmet, however.

Bibliography

Grantham, Dewey W. The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Patterson, James T. "Brown v. Board of Education": A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Wilkinson, J. Harvie, III. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

—Mark V. Tushnet

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The verb has one meaning:

Meaning #1: open (a place) to members of all races and ethnic groups
  Synonyms: integrate, mix
  Antonym: segregate (meaning #1)

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Dansk (Danish)
v. tr. - ophæve raceadskillelse i/af
v. intr. - åbne for alle racer

Nederlands (Dutch)
scheiding opheffen (m.n. rassenscheiding)

Français (French)
v. tr. - abolir la ségrégation
v. intr. - abolir la ségrégation

Deutsch (German)
v. - Rassentrennung aufheben

Ελληνική (Greek)
v. - καταργώ φυλετικό διαχωρισμό

Italiano (Italian)
dissegregare

Português (Portuguese)
v. - desagregar

Русский (Russian)
отменить расовую сегрегацию

Español (Spanish)
v. tr. - suprimir la segregación racial
v. intr. - suprimir la segregación racial

Svenska (Swedish)
v. - upphäva segregationen

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
废除种族隔离

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
v. tr. - 廢除種族隔離
v. intr. - 廢除種族隔離

한국어 (Korean)
v. tr. - 인종 차별을 철폐하다
v. intr. - 인종 차별을 철폐하다

日本語 (Japanese)
v. - 人種差別を廃止する

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(فعل) يحرر من أي قانون أو شروط للتميز العنصري‏

עברית (Hebrew)
v. tr. - ‮ביטל ההפרדה הגזעית, הנהיג אינטגרציה‬
v. intr. - ‮ביטל ההפרדה הגזעית, הנהיג אינטגרציה‬

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