Dictionary:

segregation

  (sĕg'rĭ-gā'shən)

1. The act or process of segregating or the condition of being segregated.
2. The policy or practice of separating people of different races, classes, or ethnic groups, as in schools, housing, and public or commercial facilities, especially as a form of discrimination.
3. Genetics. The separation of paired alleles or homologous chromosomes, especially during meiosis, so that the members of each pair appear in different gametes.

1. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that broker-dealers maintain separate customer accounts for purposes of obtaining Margin credit from a bank, and may not combine customers' accounts without the customers' approval. See also Commingled Funds.

2. Requirement by the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that banks maintain their Trading Account Assets or securities held for trading purposes, separate from loan and investment portfolios.

3. Separation of accounts under management by a bank trust department acting in a Fiduciary capacity for trust accounts.

noun

1. The act or process of isolating: insulation, isolation, separation, sequestration. See include/exclude.
2. The policy or practice of political, legal, economic, or social discrimination, as against the members of a minority group: apartheid, separatism. See include/exclude.

Definition: separation
Antonyms: integration

Segregation is the separation of people based on race, religion, ethnic group, sex, or social class. In the United States, racial segregation has been the most prevalent and visible form. After the abolition of slavery in 1865, laws, known as Jim Crow laws, were passed in most southern states. The term "Jim Crow" referred to an African-American character in a popular song composed in the 1830s, and these laws, already introduced after that time were designed to enforce racial separation. Segregation was not only enforced by law, but also by various forms of physical violence. African Americans were forced to sit only in the back of buses and trains, use "black only" water fountains, and enter through the back doors of hotels and restaurants—if allowed to enter at all. Laws forced blacks to live only in certain sections of a town or city, be educated in separate schools, and obtain health care in separate hospitals or wards. They were also excluded from some governmental jobs.

Segregation not only limited black people physically, but also economically and socially, by blocking access to schooling and jobs. It also served as a form of humiliation and degradation. The Supreme Court, however, upheld segregation laws as late as 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, ruling that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. This concept was argued against strongly by both African Americans and whites throughout the United States. Eventually, arguments by Thurgood Marshall before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 led the Court to declare school segregation unconstitutional. This started a series of legal battles, lobbying efforts, boycotts, and protests, which eventually brought an end to de jure, or legal, segregation and discrimination. Even so, de facto segregation, or segregation in fact, continues, and is evident in housing, education, and a number of other areas. Integration remains a continuous process in the United States.

The long-term impact of years of racial segregation persists even to this day. African Americans continue to live in the sections of cities and towns where they were initially forced to live, and they continue to suffer from a lack of economic and educational opportunities. The long and difficult experience of segregation has also resulted in deep mistrust of whites by African Americans. This has, at least in part, contributed to the noticeable disparities in health status and access to health services. In particular, African Americans appear to be more hesitant to seek medical attention. There are many potential reasons, such as previous bad experiences with white health care providers as well as the fact that they may not be as aware of their health problems as whites because of disparities in the provision of health education. Even after becoming aware of their need for services, however, African Americans may experience many barriers to accessing services (i.e., lack of insurance, transportation). They are also more likely to obtain inadequate care even after overcoming these barriers. These discrepancies are extensively documented in the health-services research literature.

(SEE ALSO: African Americans; Asian Americans; Cultural Appropriateness,; Cultural Identity; Ethnicity and Health; Ethnocentrism; Hispanic Cultures; Inequalities in Health; Prejudice; Race and Ethnicity)

Bibliography

Barnes, C. A. (1983). Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bhopal, R. (1998). "Spectre of Racism in Health and Health Care: Lessons from History and the United States." British Medical Journal 316(7149):1970–1973.

Feagin, J. R. "Segregation." World Book Encyclopedia Millennium 2000. Chicago: World Book.

Freeman, H. W.; Blendon, R. J.; Aiken, L. H.; Sudman, S.; Mullinix, C. F.; and Corey, C. R. (1987). "Americans Report on Their Access to Health Care." Health Affairs 6(1):6–8.

King, D. (1995). Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the U.S. Federal Government. Oxford: Claredon Press.

Wasby, S. L.; D'Amato, A. A.; and Metrailer, R. (1977). Desegregation from Brown to Alexander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Wolf, J. H.; Breslau, N.; Ford, A. B.; Ziegler, H. D.; and

Ward, A. (1983). "Access of the Black Urban Elderly to Medical Care." Journal of National Medical Association 75(1):41–46.

— RACHEL JEAN-BAPTISTE; DUNCAN NEUHAUSER

The separation of the subgroups of a large population, particularly into distinct residential areas. This segregation may be based on grounds of income, race, religion, or language. See index of segregation.

Early urban geographers suggested that incoming groups to the city went through a series of stages, from initial contact to complete assimilation, and they used indices of segregation to monitor the process. In this context, segregation was assumed to be undesirable. More recently, geographers have been looking at the way in which segregation might contribute to community feeling, or class formation, or the way in which residential segregation contributes to racism.

For more information on racial segregation, visit Britannica.com.

The differential concentration of the components of mixed concrete.

The practice of segregating people by race and gender has taken two forms. De jure segregation is separation enforced by law, while de facto segregation occurs when widespread individual preferences, sometimes backed up with private pressure, lead to separation. De jure racial segregation was a practice designed to perpetuate racial subordination; de facto segregation of African Americans had similar effects, but sometimes could be defended as a result simply of private choice, itself an important American value. Separation of men and women occurred primarily in the workplace and in education. It contributed to the subordinate status of women, but less directly than racial segregation contributed to racial hierarchy.

Racial segregation as such was not a significant social practice before slavery was abolished because slavery itself was a system of subordination. Some northern states prohibited the immigration of free African Americans, reflecting the near-universal desire among whites to live apart from African Americans who would be socially and politically equal. In some northern cities, African Americans tended to live in neighborhoods that were racially identifiable, but de jure segregation was rare because it was unnecessary; there were few public programs of any sort that might be segregated, and de facto segregation produced the same results that de jure segregation would have. The city of Boston maintained a segregated school system from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in 1845 the state supreme court found that doing so did not violate the state constitution's guarantee of equal liberty, but the state outlawed segregation in public schools in 1855. De facto segregation in railroads and steamboats was common. The practice of taking land from Indians and forcing them to live on reservations was a type of segregation enforced by law, although the U.S. Supreme Court's treatment of Indian tribes as semi-sovereign nations lent a certain theoretical sense to separating Indians and whites into different territories.

The Emergence of Southern Racial Segregation

Slavery's abolition meant that racial subordination could persist only with new kinds of support. Informal practices of racial segregation soon sprang up throughout the South, particularly in railroads and other places generally open to the public. In response, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which made discrimination in places of public accommodation illegal. The Supreme Court held the act unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), concluding that the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying equal protection of the law, did not authorize Congress to adopt laws dealing with private discrimination.

After Reconstruction, whites sought to reinforce patterns of racial hierarchy. Many southern states adopted laws expressly requiring racial segregation in transportation, schools, and elsewhere. The Supreme Court upheld such laws in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination only in connection with civil and political rights but not in connection with social rights such as were involved in education and transportation. The Court's doctrine indicated that states could require racial segregation only if the facilities provided the races were actually equal, but no state took the requirement of equality seriously, and the segregated schools and railroad cars available to African Americans were, typically, substantially worse than those available to whites. The Supreme Court's approval of segregation spurred southern legislatures to extend the Jim Crow system much more substantially to include separate seating in courtrooms; separate water fountains from which to drink; separate Bibles for swearing oaths in court; and separate swimming pools, parks, and golf courses.

De Jure Racial Segregation Declines, de Facto Racial Segregation Rises

African Americans continually mounted legal challenges to segregation, focusing at first on the inequality of facilities. Eventually, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court became convinced that separate facilities could never be equal. As the social importance of de jure segregation declined with the repeal or invalidation of statutes specifically discriminating on the basis of race, the importance of de facto segregation increased. Migration of African Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the South and North led to significant increases in residential segregation, and—in a society where children went to their neighborhood schools—to de facto segregation in education.

Sometimes residential segregation was reinforced by law. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court held unconstitutional ordinances that effectively required residential segregation. In response, real estate agents and private developers began to include provisions, called restrictive covenants, in contracts for the purchase of housing that barred resale to purchasers of a race different from that of the homeowner. The Supreme Court eventually, in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), held restrictive covenants unconstitutional, but not before patterns of residential segregation had become entrenched. National housing policy from the 1930s through the 1950s also reinforced residential segregation, as federal housing authorities required developers to include restrictive covenants and supported decisions by local housing authorities to segregate the buildings they owned. When combined with differences in the wealth of African Americans and whites, these policies helped create urban ghettoes in which African Americans and, in some parts of the country, Hispanic Americans were concentrated.

Some antidiscrimination laws enacted in the 1960s provided the legal basis for challenging de facto segregation, but in general such attacks failed. Legislatures and courts regarded de facto segregation as resulting from private choices by people with different amounts of money to spend on housing, and therefore as less morally questionable than de jure segregation. The Supreme Court held that only de jure segregation violated the Constitution. By the early 1970s, Justice William O. Douglas, a liberal, and Justice Lewis F. Powell, a moderate conservative, urged their colleagues to abandon the distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. The Court never did, however, in part because liberals were concerned that the courts could not successfully take on the challenge of eliminating de facto segregation, while conservatives were concerned that the courts would try to do so.

Gender Segregation

Separation of men and women was also common. Often influenced by labor unions and early feminists, state legislatures adopted what were known as protective labor laws, barring women from particular occupations regarded as inappropriate for women, or restricting the hours women could work while leaving untouched employers' ability to contract with men for longer hours. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court upheld a state law limiting the hours women could work, noting the extensive information about workplace safety submitted by public advocate Louis Brandeis. In Goesaert v. Cleary (1948), the Court upheld a law barring women from working as bartenders, except when their husbands owned the bars. Sincerely defended as being in the best interests of women who would become ill if they worked long hours, or morally degraded if they worked in certain occupations, the protective labor laws rested on assumptions about women's proper role that were part of a system of gender hierarchy.

The creation of separate educational institutions for girls and women had even more complex effects on the gender system. Women typically took different courses than men did, specializing in subjects that were thought particularly suitable for women who would be running households and caring for others, including children. Separate educational institutions, however, also provided women students a space within which they could develop free from competition with men, and their instructors gave women students models of intellectually engaged mature women whom the students could emulate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning workplace discrimination based on sex, led courts to invalidate protective labor laws and employer work rules that had the effect of creating different departments for men and women. The feminist movement of the mid-twentieth century discredited the assumptions on which protective legislation rested and began to undermine the assumptions that had justified separate educational institutions for girls and women. From the 1960s on, colleges that had been segregated by gender voluntarily abandoned the practice, leaving only a handful of private colleges that admitted only men or only women. In United States v. Virginia (1996), the Supreme Court held unconstitutional the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute, one of the remaining state-run schools that did so—although the Court's opinion suggested that separate education for women might have more justification than did schools for men only.

Voluntary Segregation

In the 1990s, a minor flurry of interest arose in the creation of public schools for young African American men, which would have revived a form of de jure racial segregation. No such schools were created, largely because the nation's commitment against de jure racial segregation was so strong. Voluntary programs of racial separation, in the form of separate dormitories for African Americans at private colleges, had somewhat more support, and defenders of separate educational institutions for women and separate sports programs for men and women could be found even more easily. The different ways that de jure and de facto segregation contribute to creating racial and gender hierarchy seem to account for the stronger opposition to de jure than to de facto segregation, with de jure segregation expressing more clearly a social preference for hierarchy.

Bibliography

Kerber, Linda. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Kousser, J. Morgan. "'The Supremacy of Equal Rights': The Struggle Against Racial Discrimination in Antebellum Massachusetts and the Foundations of the Fourteenth Amendment." Northwestern University Law Review 82 (Summer 1988): 941–1010.

Welke, Barbara Y. "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914." Law and History Review 13 (1995): 261–316.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3d rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Segregation in education is a systemic practice or policy of establishing and maintaining racially separate educational facilities, services, and activities. Historically, racial segregation in education includes assigning African-American and white students to separate school facilities because of race, and assigning only African-American teachers, staff, and administrators to schools established for African-American students while assigning only white teachers, staff, and administrators to schools established for white students. Racial segregation also involves the use of separate buses for African-American and white students and racially separate extracurricular activities, such as athletic programs. Segregation in education also includes widespread discrimination in the educational process against groups other than African Americans, such as Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. The practice of segregation in education involves all levels of the educational process: elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools.

The American legal system has played a major role in the creation, maintenance, and elimination of segregation in public education. In the American legal system the courts generally are responsible for the interpretation of laws, and major court decisions constitute a framework of reference for discussion of the legal aspects of segregation in education. There are fifty-one legal systems in the United States: one for each of the fifty states and a separate federal legal system created by the Constitution of the United States. Although each state legal system has some responsibility for resolving legal issues about segregation in education, it is the federal legal system, and particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, that has the major role in deciding legal issues involving segregation in public education.

Any meaningful discussion of the legal aspects of segregation in education inevitably centers on the national commitment to equality that has been read into the Constitution of the United States. America did not formally commit itself to equality until after the Civil War when it abolished slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), provided individuals equal protection of the law in the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), and guaranteed individuals the right to vote in the Fifteenth Amendment (1870). An important provision of the Constitution that embraces the national commitment to equality is the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that "[n]o State shall … deny any persons within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." A primary reason for the national commitment to equality is to eliminate racial discrimination against African-Americans in all aspects of governmental (or public) activities. Congress has a role in implementing the equality policy and carries out this role when it enacts laws, including laws to eliminate segregation in education. In the final analysis the federal courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, have final authority to interpret the meaning of equality. Over time the federal courts have adopted different meanings of equality.

History

No provision in the Constitution of the United States requires governments to provide an education for any person. Rather the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires only that if a state provides public education it must make it available to all of its individuals without regards to race. All states provide a system of public education at all levels: elementary, secondary, and college-level. Racial segregation in education in the United States has its genesis in the institution of slavery. The dominant social philosophy during slavery was that African Americans were inferior to whites. The Supreme Court legalized slavery's social philosophy in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sanford. The Court held, in Dred Scott, that even emancipated African Americans who had been free for many years were to be "regarded as beings of an inferior order" who were "altogether unfit to associate with the white race," and were "so far inferior that they [had] no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Laws prohibited education of slaves prior to the abolition of slavery in slave-holding states.

In some nonslave-holding states, public schools were desegregated when they first appeared in the United States, but eventually some African-American parents took steps to set up privately funded separate schools for their children because of their dissatisfaction with the quality of education their children received in racially integrated schools. Later, some of these African-Americans students sought admission to publicly funded schools, but public school committees instead set up racially separate schools for them.

As early as 1849 a Massachusetts state court, in Roberts v. City of Boston, upheld the segregation of African-American and white students in public schools. The plaintiff in Roberts was a five-year-old African-American student who challenged the Boston, Massachusetts, school committee's refusal to admit her to an all-white primary school. Rejecting the plaintiff's argument that segregation of students in public schools because of race violated the state's constitutional mandate of equality, the court held that the school committee's decision represented a reasonable and nondiscriminatory exercise of its power. The court held also that if racial segregation generated feelings of prejudice in black students, then law probably could not change those feelings. Roberts was one of the first cases to adopt the separate-but-equal theory of equality. The separate-but-equal theory of equality, like the Dred Scott philosophy, was motivated by racism; thus it did not make it lawful for school boards to establish racially segregated schools. The Supreme Court relied on the Roberts case in its 1986 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson to hold that racial segregation of African Americans and whites was lawful and therefore did not violate the equality policy in the federal constitution. A few state courts rejected the Roberts case's separate-but-equal doctrine by holding that racially segregated schools violate the rights of African-American students to equality.

Almost immediately after the Civil War and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, southern states enacted laws called "black codes." These codes were enacted to try to retain as much as possible the Dred Scott philosophy by codifying almost every aspect of the lives of former slaves, including circumstances under which they could be educated. Legally mandated racial segregation was not confined to public schools, nor was it confined to the south. Many border and northern states maintained some form of segregation, including public schools, until the end of World War II.

From Plessy to Brown

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court held that a Louisiana law requiring racial segregation of passengers in railway coaches was not prohibited by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Louisiana law required "separate railway carriages for the white and colored races" on all passenger railways within Louisiana. In upholding the Louisiana law, the Court legally sanctioned the separate-but-equal theory of equality. The separate-but-equal doctrine holds that the equality does not require racial integration if a state provides separate accommodations or services for blacks that are equal to those provided to whites. The Roberts decision, rather than its subsequent repeal by the Massachusetts legislature, was a major legal precedent on which the Supreme Court relied in its Plessy decision. In Cumming v. Richmond Board of Education, the Court suggested that the constitutionality of segregation in the field of education had not yet been decided. But in Gong Lum v. Rice, decided in 1927, the Court relied upon both the Plessy and Roberts cases to reject a claim by a Chinese-American student who claimed that she had been denied equal protection because she had been assigned to a public school for African-American students. Despite the ambivalence in the Supreme Court cases on whether the Plessy separate-but-equal theory of equality applied to public education, the courts, including the Supreme Court, accepted the view that the Plessy case stated a legal rule that applied equally to public education (Briggs v. Elliot).

The separate-but-equal theory of equality provided the legal foundations for racial segregation in education (and all other state supported activities) until the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I) in 1954. Brown I was the result of a litigation strategy that relied upon a series of test cases to try to convince the Supreme Court to reject the separate-but-equal theory of equality. In a series of "equalization" cases before Brown I, major civil rights organizations claimed that state-funded graduate and professional schools for African Americans, although racially "separate," did not provide African-American students an education opportunity "equal" to educational opportunities available to white students in schools reserved for whites. Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court, played a major role in the legal campaign to overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine. Brown I involved legal challenges to segregated elementary and secondary public schools in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

The Supreme Court rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine in Brown I. The legal issue in Brown I was whether state-supported racial segregation in public elementary and secondary schools was lawful under the equal protection clause of the federal constitution even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal. In specifically addressing this issue, the Court held that "[i]n the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" because "[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The Court, in Brown I, left undecided the issue of what states had to do to eliminate racially segregated schools, but it addressed that issue about year later in Brown II. In Brown II, the Court ordered lower federal courts to require school authorities to "make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with Brown I, and to admit students to public schools on a "racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed."

From Brown to Freeman

The southern states engaged in massive resistance to the Brown decisions. "Massive resistance" is a term that was coined in the era after Brown to describe southern states' efforts to evade and avoid the legal mandate of Brown I. Massive resistance took many forms. Some southern communities, for example, closed their schools rather than allow African-American and white students to attend the same schools. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to use the National Guard to help integrate white schools in Arkansas. Other school districts adopted "pupil placement" plans, "minority to majority" transfer plans, or "freedom of choice" schemes, all of which were adopted to avoid compliance with Brown I ; and most of these tactics succeeded in maintaining racially segregated state-supported school systems for more than a decade. The various massive resistance schemes required African-Americans parents and students to initiate legal action against many school districts in an effort to compel compliance with Brown I.

The massive resistance to Brown I produced minimal desegregation of schools by the time the Court decided Green v. School Board of New Kent County in 1968. In Green, the Court held, for the first time, that Brown I imposed an affirmative obligation on school districts to convert segregated, dual-school school systems to unitary school systems in which racial discrimination would be eliminated "root and branch." A unitary school system is one that has fully complied with the mandate of Brown I. Green also enunciated at least six criteria that lower federal courts should consider in determining whether a school system has achieved a unitary status. Those criteria focus on student assignments, faculty assignments, staff assignments, transportation (busing), extracurricular activities, and school facilities. A year later, the Court, in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, held that the Brown II"'deliberate speed' for desegregation is no longer constitutionally permissible." The federal courts have developed a substantial body of case law on remedies to determine whether dual school systems are progressing toward a unitary, nonsegregated system. These remedies include busing, magnet schools, and the location of new schools in geographical areas to maximize racial integration.

In school desegregation litigation, the Supreme Court has made an important distinction between de jure and de facto racial discrimination. De jure segregation is intentional racial discrimination that is affirmatively required by state law, custom, or usage. De facto segregation is racial separateness that occurs without the sanction of law. Brown I generally is inapplicable to de facto segregation. There has been no effort by the Supreme Court to address the constitutionality of de facto segregation since 1973 when the Supreme Court refused in Keyes v. School District No. 1 to abandon the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation.

During the years following World War II, there developed an exodus of white families who relocated to suburbia. This exodus has been described as "white flight." In the school desegregation cases, white flight is the mass migration of whites from urban communities to suburban communities to avoid enrolling their children in racially integrated inner-city schools. One of the results of white flight has been that African Americans and other persons of color have largely populated many inner cities. As a result, there are many school districts throughout the United States with a significant number of schools with no or very little racial integration.

Many school districts have been under the supervision of federal courts since 1954 when the Court decided Brown I. The Supreme Court has held that federal supervision of school desegregation programs was intended to be a temporary measure, and not to operate in perpetuity. Local control of education comes from the Constitution. The power to control education has not been delegated to the federal government; rather it is the responsibility of the various states. In several cases, the Supreme Court has provided illustrations of circumstances under which school boards should be released from federal courts supervision of desegregation orders. In Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowel, the Court held that a formerly segregated school districts may be released from court-ordered busing as long as all "practicable" steps to eliminate the vestiges of past de jure segregation have been taken. In Freeman v. Pits, the Court made clear that racial isolation of schools brought on by white flight that was not the fault of school districts is not subject to the mandate of Brown I and its progeny. In Freeman, the Court held that federal courts are justified in relinquishing supervision over school districts subject to desegregation in piecemeal fashion before full compliance with the Green criteria has been achieved. And in Missouri v. Jenkins, the Court held that a lower federal district court funding order, which relied upon creating and maintaining "desegregative attractiveness" in order to deal with white flight, was outside of the authority of the federal courts under Brown I.

Segregation in Higher Education

The Supreme Court has held that the rule it announced in Brown I is applicable to segregation in higher education, but made a distinction between the obligation of states to remedy segregation in higher education and elementary and secondary education. In United States v. Fordice, the Court addressed the issue whether, under Brown I, states that have engaged in de jure discrimination in higher education are obligated to take steps beyond adopting race-neutral admission policies to desegregate these educational institutions. In response to this question, the Court held that states have an affirmative legal obligation to remedy the remnants of prior de jure segregation. The standard the Court adopted for higher education was that states have an obligation to eliminate all policies and practices that continue to have a discriminatory effect and that are traceable to the prior de jure system.

Sex-Based Segregated Schools

United States v. Virginia is an important Supreme Court case involving sex discrimination in higher education. The case involved the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), an educational institution established by Virginia. VMI excluded females because of their gender. The Court held that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth amendment applies to sex segregation, but applied a different standard than is applicable to race discrimination. The legal rule for determining the legality of publicly supported separate schools based on gender is a more differential standard than the legal rule that is applied to racially segregated schools. Even under the differential standard used in sex discrimination cases, the Supreme Court held that VMI's policy of excluding women because of their gender was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause.

Bibliography

Brown, S. Christopher, II. 1999. The Quest to Define Collegiate Desegregation. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.

Fairfax, Lisa. 1999. "The Silent Resurrection of Plessy: The Supreme Court's Acquiescence in the Resegregation of America's Schools." Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 9:1 - 57.

Kluger, Richard. 1976. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf.

Ware, Leland B. 2001. "Setting the Stage for Brown: The Development and Implementation of the NAACP's School Desegregation Campaign, 1930 - 1950." Mercer Law Review 52:631 - 673.

Williams, Juan. 1987. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years: 1954 - 1965. New York: Viking.

— ROBERT BELTON

The act or process of separating a race, class, or ethnic group from a society's general population.

Segregation in the United States has been practiced, for the most part, on African Americans. Segregation by law, or de jure segregation, of African Americans was developed by state legislatures and local lawmaking bodies in southern states shortly after the Civil War. De facto segregation, or inadvertent segregation, continues to exist in varying degrees in both northern and southern states.

De facto segregation arises from social and economic factors and cannot be traced to official government action. For example, zoning laws that forbid multifamily housing can have the effect of excluding all but the wealthiest persons from a particular community.

De jure segregation was instituted in the southern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The state legislatures in the southern states accomplished de jure segregation by creating separate facilities, services, and areas for African Americans. Blacks were separated from the rest of society in virtually every facility, service, and circumstance, including schools, public drinking fountains, public lavatories, restaurants, theaters, hotels and motels, welfare services, hospitals, cemeteries, residences, military facilities, and all modes of transportation.

The quality of these facilities and services was invariably inferior to the facilities and services used by the rest of the communities. Laws in many states also prohibited miscegenation, or marriage between racially mixed couples. If an African American failed to observe segregation and used facilities reserved for white persons, she could be arrested and prosecuted.

In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court gave explicit approval to segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256 (1896). The High Court declared in Plessy that segregation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment if the separate facilities and services for African Americans were equal to the facilities and services for white persons. This separate-but-equal doctrine survived until 1954.

That year, in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), the Court reversed the Plessy decision. In Brown, the Court ruled that state-sponsored segregation did violate the guarantee of equal protection under the laws provided to all citizens in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Brown case concerned only the segregation of schools, but the Court's rationale was used throughout the 1950s to strike down all the remaining state and local segregation laws.

In the 1960s Congress took steps to curtail segregation in private life. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.) forbade segregation in all privately owned public facilities subject to any form of federal control under the Interstate Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. Facilities covered by the act included restaurants, hotels, retail stores, and recreational facilities. States began to follow suit by passing laws that prohibited discrimination in housing and employment. In 1968 the Supreme Court ruled that a seller or lessor of property could not refuse to sell or rent to a person based on that person's race or color (Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 88 S. Ct. 2186, 20 L. Ed. 2d 1189 [1968]).

In 1971 the Court held in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 91 S. Ct. 1267, 28 L. Ed. 2d 554 (1971), that busing schoolchildren to different schools was an acceptable means of combating de facto segregation in schools. However, subsequent court decisions have rejected the forced integration of predominantly white suburban school districts with largely black urban districts, and public education remains effectively segregated in many areas of the United States.

See: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; Civil Rights; Integration; Jim Crow Laws; Plessy v. Ferguson; School Desegregation.

The separation of allelic genes during meiosis as homologous chromosomes begin to migrate toward opposite poles of the cell, so that eventually the members of each pair of allelic genes go to separate gametes.

• adjacent s. — during meiosis adjacent centromeres segregate together.
• alternate s. — when diagonally opposite centromeres segregate together.

The policy and practice of imposing the separation of races. In the United States, the policy of segregation denied African-Americans their civil rights and provided inferior facilities and services for them, most noticeably in public schools (see Brown versus Board of Education), housing, and industry. (See integration, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and separate but equal.)