Segregation
...restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means (www.m-w.com). This is the textbook definition for segregation. But in society the concept of the word goes far deeper than this definition.
From the 1800's to 1950's, society was controlled by what was called Jim Crow laws. The term Jim Crow originated in a song performed by Daddy Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice covered his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork to resemble a black man, and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a silly black person. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character, one of several stereotypical images of black inferiority in the nation's popular culture, was a standard act in the minstrel shows of the day.
How it became a term synonymous with the brutal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth-century is unclear. What is clear, however, is that by 1900, the term was generally identified with those racist laws and actions that deprived African Americans of their civil rights by defining blacks as inferior to whites, as members of a caste of subordinate people.
The Supreme Court's sanctioning of segregation (by upholding the "separate but equal" language in state laws) in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 and the refusal of the federal government to enact anti-lynching laws meant that black Americans were left to their own devices for surviving Jim Crow (http://campus.northpark.edu). In most cases, southern blacks tried to avoid engaging whites as much as possible as the best means of evading their anger. These efforts at separating themselves from whites meant developing their own schools and community-based support groups as much as possible.
In the 1860s and early 1870s, many southern blacks actually preferred segregated schools,...
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