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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 really 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.
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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. This was problematic during reconstruction because
varying perspectives between political parties and individual beliefs would require
different interpretations of the laws pertaining to 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 Kul 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
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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 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 pertaining to public transportation.
Homer Plessy made a decision to fight this charge. When the Supreme Court’s
decision was read, the outcome would changed the course of history for 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
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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 manlihood
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 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 own 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 which would bring the goals of the first reconstruction full
circle.
Reconstruction had not succeed 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
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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 which 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 in favor of the MIA, claiming segregation to be
unconstitutional (Brinkely). Unfortunately, another court 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 grey hound bus full of white and black freedom riders were
stopped and surrounded by angry whites who became violent. When a fire bomb made
it through an open window in 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
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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 have
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 males of reconstruction and the civil rights era, “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, African American equality requires them to tolerate the existence of a
biracial society, in which they are still not ready to comply.
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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 Newsoaoer (2015): A-
4. <www.journal-news.net>.
