# Segregation: Jim Crow and its global cousins The systems that made racial separation into law: America's Jim Crow from the end of Reconstruction through Plessy to Brown and the Civil Rights Act, and the parallel systems of apartheid South Africa, White Australia, and colonial rule. *This story part of: State, law, and coercion* *The oppression of Mexican Americans parallel this story* *The oppression of Native Americans parallel this story* *Eugenics and forced sterilization in America parallel this story* *Race in the Mormon Church and in Freemasonry parallel this story* *Freedom movements: how the colonized won their independence parallel this story* *The Roma: persecution and survival parallel this story* *Nazi ideology was not unique: race myth, empire, and extermination parallel this story* ## c. November 1865 — Black Codes enacted across the South Beginning right after the Civil War, Southern state legislatures passed Black Codes restricting the freedom of formerly enslaved people. The laws limited where Black people could work, live, and travel, and used vagrancy statutes to force many into labor arrangements resembling slavery. Congress and the military governments of Reconstruction later overturned many of these laws, but similar restrictions returned once Reconstruction ended. ## 1 March 1875 — Civil Rights Act of 1875 Congress passed a federal law banning racial discrimination in public accommodations such as inns, theaters, and public transportation. It was one of the last major Reconstruction-era civil rights laws. The Supreme Court struck it down eight years later in the Civil Rights Cases. ## 1877 — Compromise of 1877 ends Reconstruction A political deal resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election by giving Rutherford B. Hayes the White House in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states. Without federal enforcement, Southern white Democrats regained full political control and began dismantling the rights gained by Black Americans during Reconstruction. This set the stage for the Jim Crow system of legal segregation that followed. ## 15 October 1883 — Civil Rights Cases strike down 1875 act The Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress power to ban discrimination by private individuals and businesses, only by state governments. This decision gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and removed a key legal barrier to segregation in restaurants, theaters, hotels, and transportation. It cleared the way for the Jim Crow laws that followed in the coming decades. ## c. 1887 — France's indigénat regime in its colonies France codified the indigénat, a body of special law applied only to colonial subjects in Algeria and later across French Africa and Indochina, denying them the citizenship rights of French nationals and subjecting them to forced labor, restricted movement, and summary punishment. The system created a formal legal separation between colonizers and the colonized population. It was not fully abolished until 1946. ## November 1890 — Mississippi constitution disenfranchises Black voters Mississippi adopted a new state constitution using poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements to strip most Black men of the vote while evading the Fifteenth Amendment's ban on racial discrimination. Other Southern states copied the approach in the following two decades, known as the Mississippi Plan. Black voter registration in the state fell from the majority of the electorate to a small fraction within a few years. ## 18 May 1896 — Plessy v. Ferguson upholds separate but equal The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 that racially segregated public facilities were constitutional as long as the facilities were equal, in a case challenging a Louisiana law requiring separate railway cars. The ruling gave constitutional cover to the Jim Crow system for the next fifty-eight years. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the lone dissent, arguing the Constitution was color-blind. ## 23 December 1901 — Australia adopts the White Australia policy The newly federated Australian government passed the Immigration Restriction Act, using a dictation test to exclude non-European immigrants and formalize a policy of racial preference known as the White Australia policy. The policy operated alongside laws restricting the rights of Aboriginal Australians. It was progressively dismantled after World War II and formally ended in 1973. ## 12 February 1909 — NAACP founded A group of Black and white activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in response to lynching and race riots. It became the leading legal and organizing force against segregation for the next century. Its Legal Defense Fund later argued Brown v. Board of Education. ## c. 1916 — Great Migration begins Starting around World War I, millions of Black Southerners began moving to cities in the North, Midwest, and West to escape Jim Crow laws, lynching, and sharecropping poverty, and to take up wartime industrial jobs. The migration continued in waves until about 1970 and reshaped the racial makeup of major American cities. It also produced new patterns of housing segregation and racial tension in Northern cities. ## c. 1919 — Red Summer race riots White mobs attacked Black communities in dozens of American cities, including Chicago, Washington D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas, in the summer and fall of 1919. Hundreds of Black Americans were killed, and the violence was often triggered by Black economic advancement and returning Black veterans asserting their rights. The events showed that segregation was enforced by mob violence as well as by law. ## 31 May 1921 — Tulsa race massacre A white mob attacked the Greenwood District, a prosperous Black neighborhood known as Black Wall Street, burning it to the ground over two days. Estimates of the death toll range from dozens to as many as three hundred, and thousands were left homeless. The massacre was suppressed in official histories for decades and is now recognized as one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in American history. ## 25 March 1931 — Scottsboro Boys trial Nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train and were rapidly convicted by all-white juries in Alabama, with all but one initially sentenced to death. The case drew national and international attention to the injustice of the Jim Crow legal system and led to two landmark Supreme Court rulings on the right to counsel and jury discrimination. The defendants spent years in prison despite the weakness of the evidence. ## 25 June 1941 — Executive Order 8802 bans discrimination in defense industry President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order banning racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government, issued under pressure from a threatened March on Washington led by labor leader A. Philip Randolph. It created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the policy. It was the first federal action against employment discrimination since Reconstruction. ## 26 May 1948 — South Africa's National Party institutes apartheid The National Party won South Africa's whites-only general election and began building apartheid, a comprehensive legal system classifying people by race and segregating housing, education, employment, and marriage. Laws such as the Population Registration Act and Group Areas Act formalized racial separation over the following years. Apartheid remained in force for the next forty-six years. ## 26 July 1948 — Executive Order 9981 desegregates the military President Harry Truman ordered equal treatment and opportunity for all members of the armed forces regardless of race, ending official segregation in the U.S. military. Implementation took several years, with the last segregated units disbanded during the Korean War. It was one of the first major federal breaks from segregation policy. ## 17 May 1954 — Brown v. Board of Education The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, overturning the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, argued the case. Many Southern school districts resisted the ruling for years, and full desegregation took over a decade to enforce in much of the South. ## 28 August 1955 — Murder of Emmett Till A fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago was abducted, tortured, and killed by two white men in Mississippi after being accused of offending a white woman in a store. His mother held an open-casket funeral and let photographs of his mutilated body be published, which galvanized the civil rights movement. The men who killed him were acquitted by an all-white jury and later confessed in a magazine interview. ## 5 December 1955 — Montgomery bus boycott Black residents of Montgomery boycotted the city's segregated bus system for over a year after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. The boycott was organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. It ended when the Supreme Court ruled Montgomery's bus segregation unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle. ## 4 September 1957 — Little Rock Nine integrate Central High School Nine Black students attempted to enroll at Little Rock Central High School under a court-ordered desegregation plan, but Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to block them. President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into the school. The crisis became a defining televised confrontation over school desegregation. ## 9 September 1957 — Civil Rights Act of 1957 Congress passed the first federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, creating a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department and a federal commission to investigate voting rights violations. The law was significantly weakened by Southern senators before passage and had limited practical effect. It nonetheless set a precedent for the stronger civil rights laws of the following decade. ## 1 February 1960 — Greensboro sit-ins Four Black college students sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter and refused to leave after being denied service, sparking a wave of nonviolent sit-ins across the South. The tactic spread to dozens of cities within weeks and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Woolworth's desegregated its lunch counters later that year. ## 21 March 1960 — Sharpeville massacre South African police shot dead sixty-nine unarmed protesters demonstrating against the pass laws. The massacre drew world condemnation and pushed the anti-apartheid movement toward armed struggle. ## 4 May 1961 — Freedom Rides Groups of Black and white activists rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test a Supreme Court ruling that banned segregation in interstate bus terminals. Riders were beaten by mobs and one bus was firebombed near Anniston, Alabama, drawing national attention. The Kennedy administration eventually ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce desegregation of bus terminals. ## 1 October 1962 — James Meredith integrates Ole Miss James Meredith became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, after a Supreme Court order and over the objection of Governor Ross Barnett. His enrollment triggered a riot on campus that killed two people and required thousands of federal troops and marshals to control. It was one of the most violent confrontations of the school desegregation era. ## c. April 1963 — Birmingham campaign The Southern Christian Leadership Conference led sit-ins, marches, and boycotts against segregation in one of the most segregated cities in the South. Police commissioner Eugene 'Bull' Connor's use of fire hoses and dogs against child protesters was broadcast nationally and shocked public opinion. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' during the campaign. ## 28 August 1963 — March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom More than 200,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to demand civil rights legislation and economic justice. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the event. The march is credited with helping build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ## 15 September 1963 — 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamite that exploded at a Black church in Birmingham, killing four young girls attending Sunday school. The bombing came weeks after the March on Washington and intensified public outrage over racial violence in the South. Convictions of the bombers did not come until decades later, the last in 2002. ## c. June 1964 — Freedom Summer voter registration campaign Civil rights organizations brought hundreds of mostly Northern volunteers to Mississippi to register Black voters and run Freedom Schools. Three volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klansmen with the involvement of local police. The campaign exposed the extreme violence used to maintain disenfranchisement in the Deep South. ## 2 July 1964 — Civil Rights Act of 1964 Lyndon Johnson signs the landmark law banning discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and federally funded programs. It creates the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and dismantles the legal architecture of Jim Crow. > "In 1964, I was making a lot of money. That’s what I walked away from to become a teacher." > — Dumbing Us Down, p. 69-76 ## 7 March 1965 — Selma to Montgomery march and Bloody Sunday State troopers violently attacked peaceful marchers, including a young John Lewis, as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to demand voting rights. Televised footage of the beatings, known as Bloody Sunday, shocked the nation. A subsequent march reached Montgomery under federal protection and directly pressured Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. ## 6 August 1965 — Voting Rights Act of 1965 Passed after the Selma marches, the act bans literacy tests and puts states with histories of discrimination under federal oversight of their election rules. Black voter registration in the South rises dramatically within a few years. ## 11 November 1965 — Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence Rhodesia's white minority government declared independence to avoid handing power to the Black majority. The move led to sanctions and a long guerrilla war before majority rule arrived as Zimbabwe. ## 12 June 1967 — Loving v. Virginia strikes down interracial marriage bans The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, in a case brought by Richard and Mildred Loving after Virginia prosecuted them for their marriage. The ruling struck down anti-miscegenation laws still in effect in sixteen states. It remains a foundational precedent for marriage rights cases. ## 4 April 1968 — Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was shot dead on a motel balcony, setting off grief and unrest across the country. His murder cut short a movement that had reshaped American law and conscience. > "By April, Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and by June so had Robert F. Kennedy" > — Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft ## 11 April 1968 — Fair Housing Act of 1968 The law banned discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, or national origin, closing a major gap left by earlier civil rights legislation. It was passed by Congress just days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Enforcement was initially weak and housing segregation patterns from decades of redlining persisted for generations. ## 16 June 1976 — Soweto uprising Black schoolchildren protesting against forced instruction in Afrikaans were met with police gunfire, sparking nationwide unrest. The uprising revived resistance to apartheid and turned global opinion against the regime. ## 27 April 1994 — End of apartheid South Africa held its first democratic election open to all races, following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the repeal of apartheid laws. Mandela's African National Congress won and he became president. The election ended forty-six years of legally enforced racial segregation.