2. Kyker 1
Racial Segregation in the United States
Racial segregation stemmed from an elite southern attitude in which fueled a white
supremacist mentality and corrupted the goals of reconstruction into a system of oppression,
prejudice, domination, and finally class consciousness. Racial equality has been an issue since
the colonization of the United States by the Spanish, European, and Dutch. It began with the
removal of Native Americans from their land for westward expansion and grew into the use of
African slaves, indentured servants, and finally immigrants for hard labor. Then the idea of racial
equality shifted into the concept of imperialism across international borders, and finally sparked
the onset of the civil rights movement. By examining the path that reconstruction opened for
civil rights in the United States, we can see that even today we are still defining and redefining
what racial equality means and what is does not mean.
Reconstruction was the opening act in a saga that would continue over the next century to
procure equal rights under the law of the United States government for all citizens of this nation.
The law of 1875 was eventually replaced by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments because it
was decidedly unconstitutional. Eric Foner calls these amendments the “sleeping giants” (Foner)
that have continually been used to bring racial inequality to the forefront for examination. He
and other political scientists believe that there were two reconstructions. The first reconstruction
that we are taught in history class and the second reconstruction that so many people call the
civil rights movement.
The concept of racial equality during the first reconstruction was a progressive idea that
did not fully take shape until the middle of the twentieth century. The United States was not
politically ready to define all of the characteristics that have come to define what equality means.
3. Kyker 2
This was problematic during reconstruction because varying perspectives between political
parties and individual beliefs would require different interpretations of the laws about equal
rights. The foundation of the United States of America had been built on racial views of white
supremacy. The concept of being superior to other races had been sculpted by generations of
prejudice’s and would not be erased with the passing of a few laws. These beliefs and individual
experiences were deeply ingrained into the social system of democracy and would need to be
redefined into an entirely new concept. Reshaping the beliefs of an entire nation and
encouraging citizens to accept the concept of racial equality in a bi-racial society would prove to
be cataclysmic.
Reconstruction did not bring equality for African Americans. Instead, it opened the door
for further discrimination, hatred, and violence toward this and other minority groups. Jim Crow
Laws, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan were an extension of the veterans of the Confederate
army and a symbol of white supremacy. Veterans of the Confederate army simply displaced their
military unity into new groups that would torture, harass, and oppress the Negros. The states
passed laws that reflected racial inequality and supported the violence against African Americans
by white racists. “Racial ties replaced familial ones. The Klan was racially pure in a way the
family can never be; it becomes the guarantor of racial identity” (Pease). This radical new vision
of racial equality that stemmed from the system of reconstruction was too obtuse for many white
American men to comprehend. A legacy of prejudice against blacks had been built on this
concept of white supremacy. The idea of black men to be named their equal was too hard to
fathom. The idea of class superiority was not new when the Europeans set foot on Native
American land. By the time Reconstruction began racial superiority had grown and would keep
reconstruction from being a success. The incompletion of reconstruction was in part due to the
4. Kyker 3
concept of white supremacy and led to further segregation and Jim Crow laws. “Many state
legislatures enacted laws that led to the legally mandated segregation of the races” (Bloom).
Blacks were not allowed to “use the same public facilities, ride the same buses, or attend the
same schools, etc.” as whites (Bloom). This concept of blacks being inferior to whites was not a
result of the failure of reconstruction; it was a result of hundreds of years of racist beliefs.
Generation after Generation of white men had dominated minorities, and this system of
superiority would not be easy to break. It finally came to a head in 1892 when an African
American man named Homer Plessy was arrested in Louisiana for breaking a state law. He
refused to give up his seat on a train for a white passenger and was arrested for breaking this
specific law about public transportation. Homer Plessy made a decision to fight this charge.
When the Supreme Court’s decision was read, the outcome would change the course of history
for a black man in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Louisiana, stating that
the Louisiana law requiring a black man to give up his seat to a white passenger was
constitutional as long as he was given equal accommodation. They maintained that it did not
violate the “equal protection” clause in the fourteenth amendment. (Courts) The ruling in this
court case would mark the beginning of a long journey toward equal rights in the United States.
While racial segregation in the United States continued, so did the growing need for
domination over other races. Theodore Roosevelt equated success and manhood with expansion,
domination, and white supremacy. The white men’s inability to completely control the minority
issues that resided within their domestic circles could have led to their need to stake their claim
and dominate other nations. Imperialism, like slavery and reconstruction, was closely tied to
white supremacist views. The southern Democratic Party feared the new role that black men
played in their world. This loss of power over an “inferior race” (Pease) led to a great political
5. Kyker 4
divide and a need to dominate. The United States, who had always kept its distance in foreign
affairs, became an international imperial power that would manipulate those in need to build
their economy and wealth.
The United States decision to build a global empire began as a claim for the sake of
humanitarian efforts. The country that had built its wealth on the backs of slaves hypocritically
claimed to care about the well-being of other minority races in countries like Cuba, the
Philippians, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. Meanwhile, at home in the United States, racial tensions
between whites and blacks began to build until they erupted into the civil rights movement that
would bring the goals of the first reconstruction full circle.
Reconstruction had not succeeded in giving African Americans equal rights, neither had
the Supreme Court’s decisions against Homer Plessy. In 1955, in Montgomery Alabama, a black
woman by the name Rosa Parks sat in the fifth row of a greyhound bus on her way home from
work. Mrs. Parks was abiding by the laws of the public transportation system that confined
black passengers to the area of the bus from row five to the back of the bus. When the bus driver
asked her and three other black passengers to move to the back of the bus and allow white
citizens to sit in their place, Mrs. Parks was the only one to refuse. After the media caught wind
of the story and a local preacher organized an advocacy group the MIA, ninety-nine percent of
the African American population in Montgomery Alabama boycotted using the bus for
transportation. (Brinkely) The profit lost by the bus companies had a huge economic impact on
the community that proved that white working America was dependent on black working
American. A concept that the white population had feared since reconstruction. The MIA
continued to press for equal rights under the eyes of the law and in 1960 the Supreme Court ruled
for the MIA, claiming segregation to be unconstitutional (Brinkely). Unfortunately, another court
6. Kyker 5
ruling was not enough to change the years of racism that was engrained into the very hearts of
southern white supremacists. A group of Rosa Park supporters and civil rights advocates (black
and white) together formed the Freedom Riders. They spent seven months in 1961 riding up and
down the southern bus routes, testing the outcome of the Supreme Court ruling of 1960. On May
14, 1961, a Greyhound bus full of white and black freedom riders were stopped and surrounded
by angry whites who became violent. When a firebomb made it through an open window on the
bus, these white supremacists blockaded the doors on the bus screaming “burn them alive,”
(Holmes) and “fry the goddam niggers” (Holmes) . Hundreds of years of prejudice and racial
tensions exploded into a series of events that would eventually lead to the passage of the civil
rights act. However, like all the other laws and amendments and Supreme Court decisions, the
civil rights act did not eliminate the racism that still exist today.
Education, experience, empathy, and compassion have not proven to be enough to tame
the fires that burn under racial differences. Reconstruction, Imperialism, and the civil rights
movements were all political principles that were founded on the idea of giving all American
male citizens equal opportunities. Greed, expansions, and dominance of other countries are all
actions that have sought to undermine the concept of racial equality. Historically, an elite class
of white males has dominated the United States’ political and social decisions since its
foundation was laid. They have looked down on the poor, uneducated African-American man
and have felt a sense of class superiority over him since the onset of slavery in the Americas. To
the racist men of the reconstruction and the civil rights eras, “Black victory meant the death of
this class that had mobilized for massive resistance to segregation to defend its own power and
position in the name of the whole white population…” (Bloom). To the racist white male today,
7. Kyker 6
African American equality requires them to tolerate the existence of a biracial society, in which
they are still not ready to comply.
8. Kyker 7
Works Cited
Bloom, Jack. Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement. University of Indiana, 1987.
Brinkely, Douglas. "Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Alabama Boycott." U.S. History Pre-
Columbian to the New Milennian (2014).
Constitution, Framers of our. "American Government." Volkomer, Walter E. American
Government. Ed. Reid Hester. 14. New York: Pearsons, n.d. 54-58. 2013.
Courts, United States. The Plessy Decision. Washington: United States Courts, 2009.
<www.theplessydecision>.
Fang, Marina. "Obama to Outline Criminal Justice Reform In NAACP Speech." Huff Post
(2015).
Foner, Eric. "Civil Rights during Reconstruction." PBS (2014).
<www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/activism/sf_rights.htm>.
Holmes, Marian Smith. "The Freedom Riders, Then and Now. Fighting Racial Segregation in the
South." Smithsonian Magazine (2009).
Pease, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Cultures of the United States Imperialism. Duke Press, 1993.
Pitts, Leonard. "Us Needs Justice System Worthy of Name." The Journal Newspaper (2015): A-
4. <www.journal-news.net>.
