racial segregation essay

The Great Real Estate Reset

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V ery few Americans live in neighborhoods that are affordable, green, close to jobs, and racially and economically integrated—to the point where it is a relatively common view that such communities are an idealistic or utopian vision rather than an achievable goal or national necessity. While most Americans agree that our economic system favors the powerful, there is no broad consensus from the white majority that integration is essential to make our country more fair. Racial integration without economic integration—also known as gentrification —has consumed the urbanist movement with controversy .

A mountain of research and a world of common sense tell us that place matters . There are so many essentials to the American dream that are geographically constrained, and the only way to ensure that Americans of all races and incomes have a fair opportunity is to build a world where good neighborhoods are not scarce, expensive, and exclusive, and where all households can put down roots and keep them. The attributes of communities of opportunity—good schools, proximate jobs, retail amenities, and parks—are tied to place. We need more good places for more people.

Today, well over half a century since the civil rights movement fought for the principle that separate is inherently unequal, real estate industry practices and local public policies have not been held accountable for making very little progress on integrating our neighborhoods. If we want to see progress on inclusion and racial justice, the industry and policymakers will have to work together to dismantle these systems and replace them with ones that nurture opportunity and connection.

Generations of economic and demographic shifts—facilitated by public policy—have produced a hyper-segregated metropolitan landscape, enabling predatory lending structures in and devaluation of minority neighborhoods.

Federally subsidized suburbs created generational wealth-building opportunities for white people.

After World War II, loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs opened up the possibility of homeownership (and wealth-building) to millions of American households. However, these loan programs were explicitly structured to exclude Black people and to favor particular places : the newly minted suburbs.

In 1950, the 50 largest U.S. metro areas contained almost half of the country’s population. These areas in aggregate were 90% white in that year (matching the nation as a whole), but the suburbs were even whiter, at 94%. As the civil rights movement opened up the prospect of integration, white flight to the suburbs only intensified, significantly increasing the spatial scale of racial segregation. Jurisdictional boundaries reinforced this segregation: Even as Black and immigrant populations began to move into suburban areas, they encountered the same exclusionary and segregationist zoning policies that created segregated cities and the first white suburbs years prior. The upshot of all this is that today, the vast majority of white people live in suburbs—and white people and people of color largely do not live in the same suburbs.

Even after decades of growing diversity and spatial mobility, most Americans still live in racially segregated neighborhoods.

From 1950 to 2018, the United States went from 90% white to 60% white. The U.S. has been becoming more multiracial rapidly in recent decades, with the total population of people of color increasing by 51% between 2000 and 2018 , compared to a 1% increase in the white population.

All this change has yielded some progress on racial integration. As Figure 2 shows, the neighborhood of an average white resident in the 100 largest metropolitan areas became slightly less white between 2000 and 2018, decreasing from 79% white to 71%. More notably during this period, the neighborhood of the average Black resident crossed the threshold from majority-Black to a diverse plurality because of Latino or Hispanic population growth. Still, while our cities and regions are becoming far more racially and ethnically diverse, segregation has remained persistent.  

Suburbanization has also segregated the nation’s neighborhoods by income.

By enormously expanding the footprint of the American metropolitan settlement, suburbanization created a patchwork of communities built by design to be spatially sorted by income. Both modern zoning and the scale of modern housing industry production have channeled a century of growth into different types of housing rigidly segregated in space. Growth at the subdivision scale, instead of by parcel or by block, created and catapulted to dominance an unprecedented urban form: communities where detached single-family homes do not share a property line or road access with anything but other single-family homes. Thus, those who can afford those homes do not see or share space with households outside their real estate market bracket. The allocation of low-income housing tax credits, housing vouchers, and the siting of public housing also contribute to today’s unprecedented isolation of low-income people of color.

Nationwide, over 80% of low-income Black people and three-quarters of low-income Latino or Hispanic people live in communities that meet the federal statutory definition for “low-income” communities. This is in contrast to just under half of low-income white people. These patterns have long been evident in center cities, fueling tremendous political tension between a small number of very wealthy, mostly white neighborhoods and low-income communities of color with their own needs and priorities. But such patterns are repeating themselves in suburbs , too, with the increasing concentration and isolation of low-income residents now the most common form of neighborhood change in these jurisdictions as well.

Segregation enables the real estate finance industry’s predatory targeting of Black and brown neighborhoods.

The real estate finance industry has consistently exploited and exacerbated segregation since World War II, beginning with excluding Black neighborhoods from eligibility for homeownership or rehabilitation loans—a practice known as redlining . And throughout the civil rights era, the industry exploited, reinforced, and worsened segregation through other racist lending practices .

Most recently, there is widespread evidence that the real estate finance industry targeted Black and Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods with subprime loan products, committing “reverse redlining” in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, foreclosure rates between 2005 and 2009 were an estimated 3.5 times higher in Black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, and 2.7 times higher in Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods. The cumulative outcome of decades of predatory lending practices—in combination with other economic trends—is a dramatic erosion of homeownership, concentrated in “middle neighborhoods” and legacy cities (Figure 4).

Suburbanization, particularly in slow-growth regions, has had a destabilizing effect on housing values in predominantly Black neighborhoods. But undervaluation is not only a function of low demand. Rather, systemic bias in lending and appraisals are among the reasons that Black neighborhoods are significantly devalued relative to predominantly white neighborhoods. Analysis by Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger revealed that after controlling for differences in housing quality and various neighborhood characteristics, homes in majority-Black neighborhoods were valued 23% lower than homes in neighborhoods with few or no Black residents.

Why these trends matter

Public policy and industry practice have produced a separate and unequal landscape of American neighborhoods, propagating multigenerational negative impacts on health, social mobility, and wealth for people of color as well as harmful divisions in our economy and society.

These systemic inequities have most recently been exposed by COVID-19’s disparate impacts along lines of race and ethnicity. Nationwide, Black people are dying at 2.4 times the rate of white people—the result of the inequitable living conditions, work circumstances, underlying conditions, and lower access to health care that characterize segregated neighborhoods.

But the impacts of segregation extend much further than COVID-19. Segregation has made it possible to geographically target—as well as withhold resources from—minority communities through a host of negative policies and practices, including overpolicing, underinvestment, and devaluation . These are forces that impede wealth accumulation and halt social mobility. As of 2016, the median net worth among white families was 10 times that of Black families, and more than eight times that of Latino or Hispanic families.

These racial wealth differences are not simply due to familial or inheritable differences—they are the result of a community context with worse access to education, employment opportunities, health care, and open space. For example, Black students are seven times more likely than white students to attend high-poverty schools with a high share of students of color, which have been consistently linked to lower academic achievement levels. Black urban neighborhoods are literally hotter , sometimes by 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more. And Black entrepreneurs—including those in real estate —have less access to capital (such as the Paycheck Protection Program ) in part due to racial prejudice and ongoing redlining by business lenders and the appraisal industry. Because of that, Black small businesses owners are more likely than their white counterparts to use personal savings and finances (including home equity) to start businesses—repeating segregation’s loop of exclusion and discrimination, where Black people face barriers to homeownership and wealth-building in communities of opportunity.

Beyond the direct effects on individuals and families, race- and income-based segregation has long-term, negative impacts that affect all residents of a community. A 2017 report from the Urban Institute and Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council found that higher levels of racial segregation are associated not only with lower income levels for Black people, but also lower educational attainment for both white and Black people, as well as lower levels of public safety for all residents of an area. Similarly, Perry and his colleagues document a $156 billion cumulative loss from the devaluation of homes in Black neighborhoods—money that would otherwise be circulating in local economies. As law professor Sheryll Cashin observed , this “segregation tax” is also costly to white people, who pay extreme price premiums to live in exclusive neighborhoods. McKinsey & Company estimates that continued racial and economic segregation will cost the U.S. 4% to 6% of its GDP by 2028 due to its dampening effect on consumption and investment.

Whatever the calculations, policymakers and industry leaders need to take heed of these impacts and use their power to divest from the exploitation and exclusion of communities of color. Instead, they should actively invest in new policies and practices that will advance connection, integration, and prosperity for Black and brown people and places.

The authors thank David Edmondson for contributing the original concept design for Figure 1, DW Rowlands for assistance in creating Figure 1, and Andre M. Perry and Alan Mallach for their insightful reviews and feedback.

About the Authors

Tracy hadden loh, fellow – anne t. and robert m. bass center for transformative placemaking, christopher coes, nonresident senior fellow – metropolitan policy program, becca buthe, research analyst – smart growth america.

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Collection Civil Rights History Project

Articles and essays.

Steven F. Lawson
Department of History, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
National Humanities Center Fellow
©National Humanities Center

Racial segregation was a system derived from the efforts of white Americans to keep African Americans in a subordinate status by denying them equal access to public facilities and ensuring that blacks lived apart from whites. During the era of slavery, , mainly in rural areas. Under these circumstances, segregation did not prove necessary as the boundaries between free citizens and people held in bondage remained clear. Furthermore, Before the Civil War, segregation existed mainly in cities in both the North and the South.blacks and whites lived in close proximity on farms and and geographical isolation made contact between infrequent. However, , experienced segregation in various forms. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in (1857) that African Americans were not U.S. citizens, northern whites had excluded blacks from seats on public transportation and barred their entry, except as servants, from most hotels and restaurants. When allowed into auditoriums and theaters, blacks occupied separate sections; they also attended segregated schools. Most churches, too, were segregated.

Reconstruction after the Civil War posed serious challenges to white supremacy and segregation, especially in the South where most African Americans continued to live. The abolition of slavery in 1865, followed by ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) extending citizenship and equal protection of the law to African Americans and In the years immediately after the Civil War segregation eased somewhat.the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) barring racial discrimination in voting, threatened to overturn the barriers whites had erected to keep blacks separate and unequal. Yet the possibilities of blacks and public accommodations with whites increased during the period after 1865. Blacks obtained access to streetcars and railroads on an integrated basis. Indeed, many transportation companies favored integration because they did not want to risk losing black business.

African Americans did gain admission to desegregated public accommodations, but racial segregation, or Jim Crow as it became popularly known, remained the custom. (The term Jim Crow originated from the name of a character in an 1832 minstrel show, where whites performed in black face.) Passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred racial discrimination in public accommodations, provides evidence of the continued presence of segregation and the need to rectify it. The law lasted until 1883, when the Supreme Court of the United States declared the statute unconstitutional for regulating what the justices considered private companies, such as streetcars and entertainment facilities. By this time, the interracial Reconstruction governments had fallen in the South and the federal government had retreated from strong enforcement of black civil rights. With white-controlled governments back in power, the situation of southern blacks gradually deteriorated. To maintain solidarity and remove possible political threats, white southerners initiated a series of efforts to reduce further African American citizenship rights and enforce Jim Crow. The Supreme Court’s 1883 ruling in In the 1880s legislation strengthened segregation in the South. By the 1890s it had become entrenched.the Civil Rights Cases spurred states to enact segregation laws. Between 1887 and 1892, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia refused equal access to African Americans on public accommodations and transportation. These laws forced blacks to sit in the back of the bus, on separate cars in trains, and in the balcony at theaters, for example. From this period on, became a rigid legal system separating the races from cradle to grave—including segregated hospital facilities, cemeteries, and everything in between—no longer tolerating any flexibility in the racial interactions that had previously existed.

Why did Jim Crow become entrenched in the 1890s? The third-party Populist uprising of that decade threatened conservative Democratic rule in the South. Many of those blacks who could still vote, and the number was considerable, joined the Populist insurgency. To check this political rebellion and prevent blacks from wielding the balance of power in close elections, southern Democrats appealed to white solidarity to defeat the Populists, whipped up anti-Negro sentiment, disfranchised African Americans, and imposed strict (by law) segregation.

In the North, while legislation combated segregation, African Americans were still kept separate and apart from whites.In contrast with the South, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New York all adopted laws that prohibited racial discrimination in public facilities. Yet blacks encountered segregation in the North as well. Rather than through segregation, most northern whites and blacks lived in separate neighborhoods and attended separate schools largely through segregation. This kind of segregation resulted from the fact that African Americans resided in distinct neighborhoods, stemming from insufficient income as well as a desire to live among their own people, as many ethnic groups did. However, blacks separated themselves not merely as a matter of choice or custom. Instead, realtors and landlords steered blacks away from white neighborhoods and municipal ordinances and judicially enforced racial covenants signed by homeowners kept blacks out of white areas.

In 1896, the federal government sanctioned racial segregation, fashioning the constitutional rationale for keeping the races legally apart. In the case of , the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law providing for “equal but separate” accommodations for “whites” and “coloreds” did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth was based upon a belief in white supremacy.Amendment. In its decision the majority of the court concluded that civil rights laws could not change racial destiny. “If one race be inferior to the other socially,” the justices explained, “the Constitution of the United cannot put them on the same plane.” This thinking, which accepted the idea that whites were superior to blacks, derived from scientific judgments of the time that light-skinned people had greater intelligence and a higher degree of civilization than darker-skinned groups, opinions that also fueled .

Although the Supreme Court inscribed the doctrine of “separate but equal” into law, in practice this did not happen. Local and state authorities never funded black education equally nor did African Americans have equal access to public accommodations. To make matters worse, In the South segregation prevailed unabated from the 1890s to the 1950s.after the 1890s, nearly all southern blacks lost their right to vote through measures such as , literacy tests, and the white primary. For the next fifty years racial segregation prevailed, reinforced by disfranchisement, official coercion, and vigilante terror. In addition, starting in 1913 with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who had close ties to the South, the federal government imposed racial segregation in government offices in Washington, D.C. (a policy that would not be reversed until the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s).

The struggle against Nazi racism in Europe called attention to racism in America.The bedrock of Jim Crow began to crack after World War II. The war had exposed the horrors of Nazi racism; non-white nations in ; and scientists no longer accepted the notion of superior and inferior races. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces, thus reversing a longstanding practice. In 1954, the Supreme Court justices in reversed and decided that legally sanctioned racial segregation was inherently unequal and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, the ruling signaled only a first step, and it took another decade and a for African Americans to tear down the racist edifices of segregation in the South.

The challenge is to explain to students the reasons for and the legacy of segregation.Explaining segregation to students is a lot more difficult because of the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement. The symbols of the Jim Crow past—“Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs—are found mainly in antiques stores, museums, photographs, and documentaries. Now that an African American has been elected president of the United States, segregation seems as outmoded and distant a practice as watching black and white television. Thus, the major challenge is to explain to students the reasons for and the legacy of segregation. This requires a series of questions.

The first question to ask is when did racial segregation begin? The importance of this question helps in gauging the potency and endurance of racism as a feature of American history. If segregation began Students should understand that segregation is embedded deeply in America's past.very early in the nation’s history, this suggests that racism is embedded in the very fabric of American society and culture and is something extremely difficult to eradicate. . Before the Civil War, free Negroes in the North encountered segregation in schools, public accommodations, and the military. In 1849, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in held that the state could require separate and equal schools for Negroes without violating the right of equality in the Massachusetts Constitution.

Segregation continued to exist after the Civil War and spread to the South once slaves were emancipated. Still, it is one thing to confirm that segregation Students should understand the role the federal government played in establishing and dismantling segregation.persisted following slavery, as evidenced by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and another to assess its strength. What seems unique about race relations from the 1870s to the early 1890s was its porousness: segregation was not as rigid then as it later became. Moreover, blacks still had the right to vote and could wield influence in public affairs. This changed in the 1890s, and teachers should make clear the decisive role of the federal government in contributing to the establishment of hardcore segregation in the South. Thus, Jim Crow did not come about just through individual acts of prejudice but required government intervention from the North as well as the South. Without the official Students should understand that Jim Crow was not simply a matter of individual acts of prejudice. It required government sanction.approval of the Supreme Court in , the southern states would not have had the constitutional power to enforce Jim Crow. Only when the federal government took action after World War II in what has been called “the Second Reconstruction” did segregation fall, thereby highlighting the critical position Washington, D.C. played in preserving and then dismantling Jim Crow.

Despite complicity from the North, the harshest and most long-lasting forms of segregation occurred in the South. Why were white southerners so adamant in maintaining segregation? Students should comeSegregation was intended to enforce and underscore the subordinate position of blacks in American society. to recognize that segregation was part of the system to subjugate African Americans and affirm their status as inferior people. Southern whites considered this system of vital importance because of the vast majority of African Americans lived in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separate was never equal nor was it meant to be. Segregation was intended to debase African Americans, strip them of their dignity, reinforce their inequality, and maintain a submissive agricultural labor force. In this way, you can point out to students that the southern United States from the 1890s through the 1960s was similar in many ways to South Africa during its Apartheid Era.

In addition, Jim Crow can be viewed as a system of “disease control.” to prevent them from infecting whites with the social and cultural impurities associated with “inferior” African Americans. White men established segregation to keep black men from having sexual relations with white women. Viewing miscegenation as the ultimate threat to the perpetuation of their superior racial stock, they often resorted to black men for allegedly raping white women. In doing so, white men not only reinforced their but also white women. They sought to maintain the virtue and chastity of their wives and daughters, reinforcing their patriarchal roles as husband, father, and ultimately guardian of their communities. However, it can be debated whether the real issue was sexual purity or power, for many white southern men both during slavery and Jim Crow actively pursued clandestine sexual relations with black women,

Segregation grew out of fear and a desire to control.Nevertheless, this fear of miscegenation, whether real or imagined, reinforced Jim Crow. White southerners were adamant about maintaining school segregation, particularly in the early grades, because they did not want little white girls to socialize with black boys, which might lead to more intimate relations as they turned into teenagers and young adults.

How did African Americans respond to Jim Crow and did they view separation and segregation in the same way? Having students Students should understand the difference between voluntary separation and segregation. compare the two should reveal that for the most part African Americans did not oppose separation so long as it was voluntary. Following the Civil War, blacks formed their own schools, churches, and civic organizations over which they exercised control that provided independence from white authorities, including their former masters. African Americans took great pride in the institutions they built in their communities. Black businessmen accumulated wealth by catering to a Negro clientele in need of banks, insurance companies, health services, barber shops and beauty parlors, entertainment, and funeral homes. African Americans as diverse politically as Booker T. Washington in the 1890s , Marcus Garvey in the 1920s , W.E.B. DuBois in the 1930s advocated that blacks concentrate on promoting self-help within their communities and develop their own economic, Integration weakened some black community institutions. social, and cultural institutions. Ironically, one of the unintended side effects of racial integration in the second half of the twentieth century was the erosion of longstanding black business and educational institutions that served African-Americans during Jim Crow.

Students can then see that in contrast to voluntary separation and self-determination, segregation was coercive and grew out of attempts to maintain black subordination and second-class citizenship. Sanctioned by the government, Jim Crow demeaned African Americans, denied them equal opportunity, and assigned them to the margins of public life. If African Americans overstepped Jim Crow’s boundary lines they were forced back by law and, if necessary, through retributive violence.

How did African Americans challenge segregation and white supremacy ? In other words, when did the Civil Rights Movement begin and Begin your teaching of the Civil Rights Movement with World War II. what did it seek to accomplish? These are questions that historians still debate. My advice is to start before the usual launching point of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and begin with World War II, when African Americans began a “ Double V” Campaign —victory against totalitarianism abroad and racism at home. The continued migration of blacks to the North and West gave African Americans increased voting power to help pressure presidents from Harry Truman on to pass civil rights legislation that would aid their family, friends, and neighbors remaining in the South. At the same time, southern black communities organized and mobilized. A new generation of leaders, many of them military veterans or black college graduates , challenged Jim Crow and disfranchisement. Black women have often been ignored as a significant force behind the Civil Rights Movement, with the focus on the men who led the major organizations. However, teachers should emphasize the role of mothers who permitted their children to face the dangers of integrating schools , daughters who readily joined protest demonstrations, domestic servants who walked miles to work to boycott segregated buses , and churchwomen who rallied their congregations behind civil rights.

Finally, what did African Americans strive for in eliminating segregation? Usually integration is wrongly interpreted as an end in itself or an attempt by blacks to Stress that integration was a tactic, not a goal. assimilate into white society. It is most important for students to understand that for blacks integration was a tactic, not a goal. For example, African Americans sought to desegregate education not because they wanted to socialize with white students, but because it provided the best means for obtaining a quality education. Blacks confronted Jim Crow to defeat white supremacy and obtain political power —the kind that could result in jobs, affordable housing, satisfactory health care, and evenhanded treatment by the police and the judicial system. Rather than erasing their pride in being black or expressing a desire to be like whites , African Americans gained an even greater respect for their race through participation in the Civil Rights Movement and their efforts to shatter Jim Crow.

Historians Debate

In 1955, C. Vann Woodward published The Strange Career of Jim Crow . Woodward reflected the optimism following the previous year’s Brown decision by arguing that segregation was not as inherent to southern society as previously believed. He demonstrated that not until the 1890s did southern whites institute the rigid system of Jim Crow that segregated the races in all areas of public life. Woodward pointed out numerous instances during and after Reconstruction when blacks had access to public accommodations. Woodward’s research suggested that segregation might be eradicated through simple changes in public policies, reversing those that had created it in the not-so-distant past.

Woodward’s book spawned a number of other studies both challenging and modifying his thesis. Many of these appeared as the South waged massive resistance to combat the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting the depth of white racism and the difficulty of overcoming it. In North of Slavery (1961), Leon Litwack found that even before the Civil War free northern Negroes encountered segregation in schools and public accommodations, the kind of discrimination they would face in the South after slavery. Accordingly, segregation had a longer pedigree than Woodward had argued, and it transcended the South and operated nationwide. Joel Williamson’s After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (1965) examined race relations in the Palmetto State and found Woodward’s interpretation wanting. Williamson concluded that freed blacks encountered segregation soon after emancipation. He asserted that specific laws were not necessary to keep the races apart because segregation was maintained de facto . He discovered that most white South Carolinians did not accept racial equality and intended to adopt segregation as soon as blacks gained their freedom from slavery.

Howard N. Rabinowitz did not focus so much on the timing of segregation as on its form. In Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (1978), Rabinowitz argued that racial segregation appeared as a substitute for racial exclusion. Thus, in the post-emancipation South freed blacks gained access for the first time to public facilities such as public transportation and health and welfare services. Accordingly, segregation should not be perceived as a punitive measure but as a means of extending services, albeit separate and unequal, to African Americans.

To summarize, historians generally agree that de facto segregation both preceded and accompanied de jure segregation, but that racial interaction in public spheres was less rigid than it became after the 1890s. Whatever its form, however, Jim Crow was always separate and never equal; it constituted a means for reinforcing black subordination and white supremacy. Whatever the exact beginning of segregation, southern whites shared a broad consensus for preserving it. It required a mass, black-led, Civil Rights Movement, combined with the power and renewed willingness of the national government, to overthrow Jim Crow.

Steven F. Lawson was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1987-88. He holds a Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University and is currently Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Dr. Lawson is author of Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (1976), which won the Phi Alpha Theta prize for best first book; In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (1985); Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle (2003) ; and Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941 (3 rd ed., 2009).

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American Segregation Started Long Before the Civil War

How the founders’ revolutionary ideology laid the groundwork.

By Nicholas Guyatt | September 12, 2016

Major cities like New York and Chicago struggle with high levels of residential segregation, especially at the neighborhood level. The entrenched correlation between race and poverty is partly to blame, but segregation catches even affluent people of color. A recent study found that, while only 9 percent of white Americans earning $100,000 or more lived in poor areas, 37 percent of African-Americans on the same income level lived in poorer neighborhoods.

If we want to understand why racial segregation still exists in America, we should start by understanding its origins.

The most widely accepted account puts the blame for creating segregation on white Southerners. According to this version, defeated Confederates regrouped after the Civil War to prevent the federal government from making African-Americans equal citizens. If slavery could no longer be sustained, racist Southerners would use other weapons to intimidate and disenfranchise their black neighbors. By the 1880s, Southern whites had created the Jim Crow system, which enforced racial segregation throughout the South. Only with the advent of the civil rights movement would African-Americans succeed in dismantling this system of local oppression—with the help of Northern supporters and, crucially, a newly engaged federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

This account creates two false narratives: it presents institutionalized segregation as a Southern-only problem, and it sets American history on an upward trajectory from oppression to freedom. We miss the national roots of America’s segregation problem because we assume that the battle over slavery predated the fight for black citizenship, and that segregation struggles were a re-run of North versus South. On the contrary, the obstacles to integration in America were an offshoot of the nation’s revolutionary ideology as well as its long history of racial exploitation.

In 1776, the Founders declared that “all men are created equal.” While Thomas Jefferson and John Adams weren’t thinking about people of color when they made this bold claim, blacks and Indians, encouraged by white missionaries and social reformers, insisted that slavery and oppression were incompatible with the nation’s new creed. The Founding Fathers struggled to deny these claims.

Racial oppression, whether rooted in slavery or the theft of Indian land, had always been driven by white economic gain. But immediately after the Revolution, the Founders glimpsed a different vision of America’s future. The plantation crops that had sustained the Southern slave system were not as profitable as they had once been, and politicians in every slaveholding state agreed to ban new imports of slaves. (The cotton boom, which made American slavery more profitable than it had ever been, was still decades away.)

After 1789, officials of the new federal government believed that they could expand westward in partnership with Native people, rather than through terror and conquest. The first secretary of defense (or secretary of war, as he was known back then) was Henry Knox, a general in the Revolutionary War who’d been a bookseller before he became a soldier and politician. It was “more convenient than just” to assume that Indians could not be “civilized,” Knox told Washington in 1791. The United States could pay Native people for their “surplus” land, plant white settlers alongside them, and erase the distinction between the races.

In the case of both blacks and Indians, then, the early United States witnessed what we might call an integration moment after the Revolution. The Founders, along with a host of clergymen, politicians, newspaper editors, and moral reformers, grappled with the prospect of a multi-racial republic under the banner of “all men are created equal.” At the 18th century’s end, the prevailing thinking in science and religion held that human beings were a single species, and that “race” was a product of environment rather than biology.

But the work of promoting integration quickly ran aground. In the first place, these liberal whites—men and women who paid lip service to human equality—couldn’t quite escape their own prejudices.

African-Americans had been “degraded” by slavery, insisted white reformers, and would need to be made fit for citizenship before they could be safely emancipated. While this emphasis on black “degradation” drew attention to the need for material and educational support to African-Americans, it also created a dangerous stereotype—reinforcing the view among white “moderates” that black freedom might produce “convulsions” (as Thomas Jefferson put it) that would “end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” The language of degradation offered a problem rather than a solution. If African Americans needed schooling and support to make the transition to freedom and equality, would they receive this from federal, state, or city government? From charities? From their former enslavers? While liberal whites argued over how best to overcome degradation, many white Americans concluded that abolition would be more difficult than they had initially imagined.

The first integration moment in American history was also undone by the chauvinism of even the most forward-thinking white Americans. For government officials like Henry Knox, or educators like Princeton president Samuel Stanhope Smith, people of color had the potential to be equal to whites if they changed their culture and behavior—or even their appearance. Smith, the most influential race theorist of his day, insisted that blacks and Indians would literally come to resemble Europeans—losing their “African peculiarities”—as they gained freedom or “civilization.” When people of color failed to somehow “turn white,” or to abandon their assumptions and ways of life, liberal whites reacted with exasperation and disdain.

And then there was the prospect of racial amalgamation, which scrambled the moral compasses of even the most progressive whites. Of all the European empires in the New World, British North America was the most squeamish on the question of amalgamation. But while the science and religion of the European Enlightenment suggested no barrier to intermarriage, even white Americans who embraced “all men are created equal” struggled with the practical application of that phrase. The preacher David Rice, who tried valiantly to outlaw slavery in the Kentucky constitutional convention of 1792, admitted that his own prejudices against intermarriage were hard to shake; but he was determined, he told his fellow delegates, not to allow irrational feelings to “influence my judgment, nor affect my conscience.”

Alas, many others who spoke in the abstract against slavery failed to follow Rice’s example; or, like Thomas Jefferson, they compartmentalized their private and public lives. It’s now widely accepted that in the 1790s and 1800s, Jefferson secretly fathered six children with Sally Hemings, a multi-racial slave in his household, while insisting in public on his “great aversion” to “the mixture of color.”

It soon became apparent that the realization of “all men are created equal” required more than an abstract recognition of black or Native humanity; it required the surrender of what we now call white privilege. When even the most liberal whites struggled to meet this challenge, they developed an alternative plan that might deliver the United States from the guilt of slavery and oppression without obliging white people to live alongside people of color: perhaps blacks and Indians could be persuaded to move elsewhere.

As antislavery initiatives in the South stalled on the question of integration, and Native Americans went to war with white settlers in the Midwest, an influential group of politicians, philanthropists, and reformers proposed the same solution for both problems. Native Americans would be moved beyond the Mississippi, where they could be “civilized” by the federal government without the immediate pressure of the settlers who were rushing into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. African-Americans, meanwhile, could be freed from slavery on condition that they agree to leave the United States for a land of their own: in the far West, perhaps, or in the Caribbean or Africa. At precisely the same moment in American history— the first 30 years of the 19th century—many of the most influential figures in the United States proposed segregation as a solution to the nation’s first racial crisis.

The idea that Native people could be colonized in the West was endorsed by Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams before it was taken up by Andrew Jackson, whose determination to force Native people to leave the Southeast culminated in the notorious Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838-39. This appalling outcome, though, was merely the final stage in a process of promoting racial separation that had begun with Northern missionaries and politicians. Similarly, the proposal that African-Americans be colonized outside the United States was warmly accepted by white politicians and reformers from North Carolina to Massachusetts. If slavery had become mostly a Southern institution by the 1820s, segregation appealed to whites across the nation.

It was no surprise that Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party endorsed black colonization in the 1850s, or that Lincoln affirmed his commitment to a black exodus from the United States during the first 18 months of the Civil War. What separated Lincoln from Jackson was that the former had neither the means nor the inclination to compel black people to leave the United States. Through their vast numbers and their usefulness to the Union war effort, African-Americans managed to reject the future that had long been marked out for them by “liberal” whites. By 1863, the Lincoln administration had largely abandoned the notion that black people would agree to live somewhere else after emancipation.

But white Americans had been assured by politicians for half a century that slavery would end in racial separation rather than coexistence. The logic of segregation wasn’t the offshoot of the Civil War, nor was it the preserve of Southerners who had fought to the death to maintain slavery. America’s integration problem may have looked Southern and reactionary at the end of the 19th century, but it began as a national—and liberal—predicament.

The Founding generation spoke about racial integration in ways that may seem disconcertingly familiar to us. White reformers frequently insisted on racial equality or potential, while finding ways to postpone or derail forms of integration that required the surrender of prejudice and advantage. By acknowledging this forgotten history of segregation, we’re in a better position to interrogate our own boasts about racial “progress”—and to see that, in the long American conversation about race, moral evasion has always been a central theme.

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Abolitionism to Jim Crow

• Du Bois to Brown
• Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act
• From Black power to the assassination of Martin Luther King
• Into the 21st century
• Black Lives Matter and Shelby County v. Holder

When did the American civil rights movement start?

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The American civil rights movement started in the mid-1950s. A major catalyst in the push for civil rights was in December 1955, when NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?

Martin Luther King, Jr. , was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks , who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white customer, was also important. John Lewis , a civil rights leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington .

What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?

The American civil rights movement broke the entrenched system of racial segregation in the South and achieved crucial equal-rights legislation.

What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?

The Montgomery bus boycott , sparked by activist Rosa Parks , was an important catalyst for the civil rights movement. Other important protests and demonstrations included the Greensboro sit-in and the Freedom Rides .

What are some examples of civil rights?

Examples of civil rights include the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to government services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities.

Recent News

American civil rights movement , mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery . Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution , struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence . Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens , generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation . Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions ), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison .

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement . His autobiography—one of many slave narratives —and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln , the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party . Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property . After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment ) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment ) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment ). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction , white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “ Jim Crow ” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “ separate but equal ” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment , ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote . With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage ).

Handout A: Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Directions: Read the essay and answer the review questions at the end.

In the late nineteenth century, the promise of emancipation and Reconstruction went largely unfulfilled and was even reversed in the lives of African Americans. Southern blacks suffered from horrific violence, political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, and legal segregation. Ironically, the new wave of racial discrimination that was introduced was part of an attempt to bring harmony between the races and order to American society.

Constitutional amendments were ratified during and after the war to protect the natural and civil rights of African Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment forever banned slavery from the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment protected black citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African-American males. In addition, a Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help the economic condition of former slaves, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1875.

Roadblocks to Equality

Despite these legal protections, the economic condition of African Americans significantly worsened in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Poor southern black farmers were generally forced into sharecropping whereby they borrowed money to plant a year’s crop, using the future crop as collateral on the loan. Often, they owed so much of the resulting crop that they fell into debt for the following year and eventually into a state of debt peonage. Since 90 percent of African Americans lived in the rural South, most were sharecroppers. The story was not much different as African Americans moved to southern and northern cities. Black women found work as domestic servants and men in urban factories, but they were usually in menial, low-paying jobs because white employers discriminated against African Americans in hiring. Black workers also faced a great deal of racism at the hands of labor unions which severely limited their ability to secure high-paying, skilled jobs. While the Knights of Labor and United Mine Workers were open to blacks, the largest skilled-worker union, the American Federation of Labor, curtailed black membership, thereby limiting them to menial labor.

African Americans throughout the country suffered from violence and intimidation. The most infamous examples of violence were brutal lynchings, or executions without due process, by angry white mobs. These travesties resulted in hangings, burnings, shootings, and mutilations for between 100 and 200 blacks—especially black men falsely accused of raping white women—annually. Race riots broke out in southern and northern cities from New Orleans and Atlanta to New York and Evansville, Indiana, causing dozens of deaths and property damage.

Although African Americans were elected to Congress and state legislatures during Reconstruction, and enjoyed the constitutional right to vote, black civil rights were systematically stripped away in a campaign of disfranchisement. One method was to charge a poll tax to vote, which precious few black sharecroppers could afford to pay. Another strategy was the literacy test which few former slaves could pass. Furthermore, the white clerks at courthouses had already decided that any black applicant would fail, regardless of his true reading ability. Since both of those devices at times excluded poor whites as well, grandfather clauses were introduced to exempt from the literacy test anyone whose father or grandfather had the right to vote before the Civil War. Moreover, the Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act guaranteeing equal access to public facilities and transportation to be unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) because the law regulated the private discriminatory conduct of individuals rather than government discrimination.

Segregation

One of the most pervasive and visible signs of racism was the rise of informal and legal segregation, or separation of the races. In a wholesale violation of liberty and equality, southern state legislatures passed “Jim Crow” segregation laws that denied African Americans equal access to public facilities such as hotels, restaurants, parks, and swimming pools. Southern schools and public transportation had vastly inferior “separate but equal” facilities that left the black minority subject to unjust majority rule. Housing covenants and other devices kept blacks in separate neighborhoods from whites. African Americans in the North also suffered informal residential segregation and economic discrimination in jobs.

In one of its more infamous decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation statutes were legal in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy, the Court decided that “separate, but equal” public facilities did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or imply the inferiority of African Americans. Justice John Marshall Harlan was one of the two dissenters who wrote, “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Progressive and Race Relations

One of the great ironies of the series of reforms instituted in the early twentieth century known as the Progressive Era was that segregation and racism were deeply enshrined in the movement. Progressives were a group of reformers who believed that the industrialized, urbanized United States of the nineteenth century had outgrown its eighteenth-century Constitution. That Constitution did not give government, especially the federal government, enough power to deal with unprecedented problems. Many Progressives embraced Social Darwinism and eugenics which was part of the most advanced science and social science taught in universities and scientific circles. Social Darwinism ranked various groups, which its proponents considered “races,” according to certain characteristics and labelled Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic peoples as superior and Southeastern Europeans, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and Africans as inferior races. Therefore, there was a supposed scientific basis for segregation as the “higher” races ruled the “lower.” Moreover, Progressives generally endorsed segregation as a means of achieving their central goal of social order and harmony between the races. There were notable exceptions, such as Jane Addams, black Progressives such as W.E.B. DuBois, and the Progressives of both races who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but Progressive ideology contributed to the growth of segregation.

Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson generally supported the segregationist order. While Roosevelt courageously invited African-American leader Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House and condemned lynching, he discharged 170 black soldiers because of a race riot in Brownsville, Texas in 1906. Wilson had perhaps a worse record on civil rights as his administration fired many black federal employees and segregated federal departments.

Black Leadership

Several black leaders advanced the cause of black civil rights and helped organize African Americans to defend their interests through self help. The highly-educated journalist, Ida B. Wells, launched a crusade against lynching by exposing the savage practice. She also challenged segregation by refusing to change her seat on a train because it was in an area reserved for white women. Other African Americans unsuccessfully boycotted segregated streetcars in urban areas but utilized a method that would prove successful in the mid-twentieth century.

A debate took shape between two African-American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Washington was a former slave who founded the Tuskegee Institute for blacks in the 1880s and wrote Up from Slavery. He advocated that African Americans achieve racial equality slowly by patience and accommodation. Washington thought that blacks should be trained in industrial education and demonstrate the character virtues of hard work, thrift, and self-respect. They would therefore prove that they deserved equal rights and equal opportunity for social mobility. At the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, Washington delivered an address that posited, “In the long run it is the race or individual that exercises the most patience, forbearance, and self-control in the midst of trying conditions that wins…the respect of the world.”

DuBois, on the other hand, was a Harvard and Berlin-educated intellectual who believed that African Americans should win equality through a liberal arts education and fighting for political and civil equality. He wrote the Souls of Black Folk and laid out a vision whereby the “talented tenth” among African Americans would receive an excellent education and become the teachers and other professionals who would uplift fellow members of their race. He and other black leaders organized the Niagara Movement that fought segregation, lynching, and disfranchisement. In 1909 the movement’s leaders founded the NAACP, which fought for black equality and initiated a decades-long legal struggle to end segregation. DuBois edited its journal named The Crisis and wrote about issues affecting African Americans. He had the simple wish to “make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Wartime Changes

American participation in the Spanish-American War and World War I initiated a dramatic change in the lives of African Americans and in the demography of American society. In both wars, black soldiers were relegated to segregated units and generally assigned to menial jobs rather than front-line combat. However, black soldiers had opportunities to fight in the charges against the Spanish in Cuba and against the Germans in the trenches of France. They demonstrated that they were just as courageous as white men even as they fought for a country that excluded them from its democracy. Moreover, travel to the North and overseas showed thousands of African Americans the possibility of freedom and equality that would be reinforced in World War II while fighting tyranny abroad.

Wartime America witnessed rapid change in the lives of African Americans especially in the rural South. Hundreds of thousands left southern farms to migrate to cities in the South such as Birmingham or Atlanta, or to northern cities in a mass movement called the Great Migration. This internal migration greatly increased the number of African Americans living in American cities. As a result, tensions grew with whites over jobs and housing that led to deadly race riots during and immediately after the war. However, a thriving black culture in the North also resulted in the Harlem Renaissance and the celebration of black artists.

The Great Migration eventually led to over six million African Americans following these migration patterns and laying the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. Blacks resisted segregation when it was instituted and continued to organize to challenge its threat to liberty and equality in America.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

• What constitutional protections did the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments give African Americans?
• What economic conditions did African Americans face in the south and north in the late nineteenth century?
• What kinds of violence did African Americans suffer during the late nineteenth century?
• Despite the amendments to the Constitution protecting the rights of African Americans, what discriminatory devices systematically took away these rights?
• What was the ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case? Did the case result in the advance or reversal of the rights of African Americans? Explain your answer.
• Did African Americans make gains or suffer setbacks to their rights during the Progressive Era? Explain your answer.
• Compare and contrast the means and goals of achieving black equality for Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
• How did World War I and the Great Migration change the lives of African Americans?

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A pandemic that disproportionately affected communities of color, roadblocks that obstructed efforts to expand the franchise and protect voting discrimination, a growing movement to push anti-racist curricula out of schools – events over the past year have only underscored how prevalent systemic racism and bias is in America today.

What can be done to dismantle centuries of discrimination in the U.S.? How can a more equitable society be achieved? What makes racism such a complicated problem to solve? Black History Month is a time marked for honoring and reflecting on the experience of Black Americans, and it is also an opportunity to reexamine our nation’s deeply embedded racial problems and the possible solutions that could help build a more equitable society.

Stanford scholars are tackling these issues head-on in their research from the perspectives of history, education, law and other disciplines. For example, historian Clayborne Carson is working to preserve and promote the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and religious studies scholar Lerone A. Martin has joined Stanford to continue expanding access and opportunities to learn from King’s teachings; sociologist Matthew Clair is examining how the criminal justice system can end a vicious cycle involving the disparate treatment of Black men; and education scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students.

Learn more about these efforts and other projects examining racism and discrimination in areas like health and medicine, technology and the workplace below.

Update: Jan. 27, 2023: This story was originally published on Feb. 16, 2021, and has been updated on a number of occasions to include new content.

Understanding the impact of racism; advancing justice

One of the hardest elements of advancing racial justice is helping everyone understand the ways in which they are involved in a system or structure that perpetuates racism, according to Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks.

“The starting point for the center is the recognition that racial inequality and division have long been the fault line of American society. Thus, addressing racial inequity is essential to sustaining our nation, and furthering its democratic aspirations,” said Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice .

This sentiment was echoed by Stanford researcher Rebecca Hetey . One of the obstacles in solving inequality is people’s attitudes towards it, Hetey said. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it.”

How people talk about race and stereotypes matters. Here is some of that scholarship.

For Black Americans, COVID-19 is quickly reversing crucial economic gains

Research co-authored by SIEPR’s Peter Klenow and Chad Jones measures the welfare gap between Black and white Americans and provides a way to analyze policies to narrow the divide.

How an ‘impact mindset’ unites activists of different races

A new study finds that people’s involvement with Black Lives Matter stems from an impulse that goes beyond identity.

For democracy to work, racial inequalities must be addressed

The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

The psychological toll of George Floyd’s murder

As the nation mourned the death of George Floyd, more Black Americans than white Americans felt angry or sad – a finding that reveals the racial disparities of grief.

Seven factors contributing to American racism

Of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism, which includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.

Scholars reflect on Black history

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

The history of Black History Month

It's February, so many teachers and schools are taking time to celebrate Black History Month. According to Stanford historian Michael Hines, there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about the past, present, and future of the celebration.

Numbers about inequality don’t speak for themselves

In a new research paper, Stanford scholars Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt propose new ways to talk about racial disparities that exist across society, from education to health care and criminal justice systems.

Changing how people perceive problems

Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.

Welfare opposition linked to threats of racial standing

Research co-authored by sociologist Robb Willer finds that when white Americans perceive threats to their status as the dominant demographic group, their resentment of minorities increases. This resentment leads to opposing welfare programs they believe will mainly benefit minority groups.

Conversations about race between Black and white friends can feel risky, but are valuable

New research about how friends approach talking about their race-related experiences with each other reveals concerns but also the potential that these conversations have to strengthen relationships and further intergroup learning.

Defusing racial bias

Research shows why understanding the source of discrimination matters.

Many white parents aren’t having ‘the talk’ about race with their kids

After George Floyd’s murder, Black parents talked about race and racism with their kids more. White parents did not and were more likely to give their kids colorblind messages.

Stereotyping makes people more likely to act badly

Even slight cues, like reading a negative stereotype about your race or gender, can have an impact.

Why white people downplay their individual racial privileges

Research shows that white Americans, when faced with evidence of racial privilege, deny that they have benefited personally.

Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy

Stanford historian Clayborne Carson reflects on a career dedicated to studying and preserving the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Examining disparities in education

Scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students. Annamma’s research examines how schools contribute to the criminalization of Black youths by creating a culture of punishment that penalizes Black children more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Her work shows that youth of color are more likely to be closely watched, over-represented in special education, and reported to and arrested by police.

“These are all ways in which schools criminalize Black youth,” she said. “Day after day, these things start to sediment.”

That’s why Annamma has identified opportunities for teachers and administrators to intervene in these unfair practices. Below is some of that research, from Annamma and others.

New ‘Segregation Index’ shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status

Researchers at Stanford and USC developed a new tool to track neighborhood and school segregation in the U.S.

New evidence shows that school poverty shapes racial achievement gaps

Racial segregation leads to growing achievement gaps – but it does so entirely through differences in school poverty, according to new research from education Professor Sean Reardon, who is launching a new tool to help educators, parents and policymakers examine education trends by race and poverty level nationwide.

School closures intensify gentrification in Black neighborhoods nationwide

An analysis of census and school closure data finds that shuttering schools increases gentrification – but only in predominantly Black communities.

Ninth-grade ethnic studies helped students for years, Stanford researchers find

A new study shows that students assigned to an ethnic studies course had longer-term improvements in attendance and graduation rates.

Teaching about racism

Stanford sociologist Matthew Snipp discusses ways to educate students about race and ethnic relations in America.

Stanford scholar uncovers an early activist’s fight to get Black history into schools

In a new book, Assistant Professor Michael Hines chronicles the efforts of a Chicago schoolteacher in the 1930s who wanted to remedy the portrayal of Black history in textbooks of the time.

How disability intersects with race

Professor Alfredo J. Artiles discusses the complexities in creating inclusive policies for students with disabilities.

Access to program for black male students lowered dropout rates

New research led by Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee provides the first evidence of effectiveness for a district-wide initiative targeted at black male high school students.

How school systems make criminals of Black youth

Stanford education professor Subini Ancy Annamma talks about the role schools play in creating a culture of punishment against Black students.

Reducing racial disparities in school discipline

Stanford psychologists find that brief exercises early in middle school can improve students’ relationships with their teachers, increase their sense of belonging and reduce teachers’ reports of discipline issues among black and Latino boys.

Science lessons through a different lens

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students’ culture and the science classroom.

Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua experimentally examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

Why we need Black teachers

Travis Bristol, MA '04, talks about what it takes for schools to hire and retain teachers of color.

Understanding racism in the criminal justice system

Research has shown that time and time again, inequality is embedded into all facets of the criminal justice system. From being arrested to being charged, convicted and sentenced, people of color – particularly Black men – are disproportionately targeted by the police.

“So many reforms are needed: police accountability, judicial intervention, reducing prosecutorial power and increasing resources for public defenders are places we can start,” said sociologist Matthew Clair . “But beyond piecemeal reforms, we need to continue having critical conversations about transformation and the role of the courts in bringing about the abolition of police and prisons.”

Clair is one of several Stanford scholars who have examined the intersection of race and the criminal process and offered solutions to end the vicious cycle of racism. Here is some of that work.

Police Facebook posts disproportionately highlight crimes involving Black suspects, study finds

Researchers examined crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies and found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates.

Supporting students involved in the justice system

New data show that a one-page letter asking a teacher to support a youth as they navigate the difficult transition from juvenile detention back to school can reduce the likelihood that the student re-offends.

Race and mass criminalization in the U.S.

Stanford sociologist discusses how race and class inequalities are embedded in the American criminal legal system.

New Stanford research lab explores incarcerated students’ educational paths

Associate Professor Subini Annamma examines the policies and practices that push marginalized students out of school and into prisons.

Derek Chauvin verdict important, but much remains to be done

Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Robert Weisberg and Matthew Clair weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict, emphasizing that while the outcome is important, much work remains to be done to bring about long-lasting justice.

A ‘veil of darkness’ reduces racial bias in traffic stops

After analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.”

Stanford big data study finds racial disparities in Oakland, Calif., police behavior, offers solutions

Analyzing thousands of data points, the researchers found racial disparities in how Oakland officers treated African Americans on routine traffic and pedestrian stops. They suggest 50 measures to improve police-community relations.

Race and the death penalty

As questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system dominate the headlines, research by Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue III offers insight into one of the most fraught areas: the death penalty.

Diagnosing disparities in health, medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and has highlighted the health disparities between Black Americans, whites and other demographic groups.

As Iris Gibbs , professor of radiation oncology and associate dean of MD program admissions, pointed out at an event sponsored by Stanford Medicine: “We need more sustained attention and real action towards eliminating health inequities, educating our entire community and going beyond ‘allyship,’ because that one fizzles out. We really do need people who are truly there all the way.”

Below is some of that research as well as solutions that can address some of the disparities in the American healthcare system.

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

The American Heart Association has provided funding to two Stanford Medicine professors to develop ways to diversify enrollment in heart disease clinical trials.

Striking inequalities in maternal and infant health

Research by SIEPR’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater finds wealthy Black mothers and infants in the U.S. fare worse than the poorest white mothers and infants.

More racial diversity among physicians would lead to better health among black men

A clinical trial in Oakland by Stanford researchers found that black men are more likely to seek out preventive care after being seen by black doctors compared to non-black doctors.

A better measuring stick: Algorithmic approach to pain diagnosis could eliminate racial bias

Traditional approaches to pain management don’t treat all patients the same. AI could level the playing field.

5 questions: Alice Popejoy on race, ethnicity and ancestry in science

Alice Popejoy, a postdoctoral scholar who studies biomedical data sciences, speaks to the role – and pitfalls – of race, ethnicity and ancestry in research.

Stanford Medicine community calls for action against racial injustice, inequities

The event at Stanford provided a venue for health care workers and students to express their feelings about violence against African Americans and to voice their demands for change.

Racial disparity remains in heart-transplant mortality rates, Stanford study finds

African-American heart transplant patients have had persistently higher mortality rates than white patients, but exactly why still remains a mystery.

Finding the COVID-19 Victims that Big Data Misses

Widely used virus tracking data undercounts older people and people of color. Scholars propose a solution to this demographic bias.

Studying how racial stressors affect mental health

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is interested in the way Black youth and other young people of color navigate adolescence—and the racial stressors that can make the journey harder.

Infants’ race influences quality of hospital care in California

Disparities exist in how babies of different racial and ethnic origins are treated in California’s neonatal intensive care units, but this could be changed, say Stanford researchers.

Immigrants don’t move state-to-state in search of health benefits

When states expand public health insurance to include low-income, legal immigrants, it does not lead to out-of-state immigrants moving in search of benefits.

Excess mortality rates early in pandemic highest among Blacks

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been starkly uneven across race, ethnicity and geography, according to a new study led by SHP's Maria Polyakova.

Decoding bias in media, technology

Driving Artificial Intelligence are machine learning algorithms, sets of rules that tell a computer how to solve a problem, perform a task and in some cases, predict an outcome. These predictive models are based on massive datasets to recognize certain patterns, which according to communication scholar Angele Christin , sometimes come flawed with human bias . 

“Technology changes things, but perhaps not always as much as we think,” Christin said. “Social context matters a lot in shaping the actual effects of the technological tools. […] So, it’s important to understand that connection between humans and machines.”

Below is some of that research, as well as other ways discrimination unfolds across technology, in the media, and ways to counteract it.

IRS disproportionately audits Black taxpayers

A Stanford collaboration with the Department of the Treasury yields the first direct evidence of differences in audit rates by race.

Automated speech recognition less accurate for blacks

The disparity likely occurs because such technologies are based on machine learning systems that rely heavily on databases of English as spoken by white Americans.

New algorithm trains AI to avoid bad behaviors

Robots, self-driving cars and other intelligent machines could become better-behaved thanks to a new way to help machine learning designers build AI applications with safeguards against specific, undesirable outcomes such as racial and gender bias.

Stanford scholar analyzes responses to algorithms in journalism, criminal justice

In a recent study, assistant professor of communication Angèle Christin finds a gap between intended and actual uses of algorithmic tools in journalism and criminal justice fields.

Move responsibly and think about things

In the course CS 181: Computers, Ethics and Public Policy , Stanford students become computer programmers, policymakers and philosophers to examine the ethical and social impacts of technological innovation.

Homicide victims from Black and Hispanic neighborhoods devalued

Social scientists found that homicide victims killed in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods received less news coverage than those killed in mostly white neighborhoods.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

AI Index Diversity Report: An Unmoving Needle

Stanford HAI’s 2021 AI Index reveals stalled progress in diversifying AI and a scarcity of the data needed to fix it.

Identifying discrimination in the workplace and economy

From who moves forward in the hiring process to who receives funding from venture capitalists, research has revealed how Blacks and other minority groups are discriminated against in the workplace and economy-at-large. 

“There is not one silver bullet here that you can walk away with. Hiring and retention with respect to employee diversity are complex problems,” said Adina Sterling , associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). 

Sterling has offered a few places where employers can expand employee diversity at their companies. For example, she suggests hiring managers track data about their recruitment methods and the pools that result from those efforts, as well as examining who they ultimately hire.

Here is some of that insight.

How To: Use a Scorecard to Evaluate People More Fairly

A written framework is an easy way to hold everyone to the same standard.

Archiving Black histories of Silicon Valley

A new collection at Stanford Libraries will highlight Black Americans who helped transform California’s Silicon Valley region into a hub for innovation, ideas.

Race influences professional investors’ judgments

In their evaluations of high-performing venture capital funds, professional investors rate white-led teams more favorably than they do black-led teams with identical credentials, a new Stanford study led by Jennifer L. Eberhardt finds.

Who moves forward in the hiring process?

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research by Stanford sociologist David Pedulla.

How emotions may result in hiring, workplace bias

Stanford study suggests that the emotions American employers are looking for in job candidates may not match up with emotions valued by jobseekers from some cultural backgrounds – potentially leading to hiring bias.

Do VCs really favor white male founders?

A field experiment used fake emails to measure gender and racial bias among startup investors.

Can you spot diversity? (Probably not)

New research shows a “spillover effect” that might be clouding your judgment.

Can job referrals improve employee diversity?

New research looks at how referrals impact promotions of minorities and women.

Home / Essay Samples / Social Issues / Racism / Racial Segregation

Racial Segregation Essay Examples

The case of tom robinson from to kill a mockingbird.

Tom Robinson is a man that lives in Maycomb, Alabama and he is a field worker. Tom Robinson is an African American that is on trial for allegedly raping a 19-year-old women Mayella Ewell, her father was the one accusing Mr. Robinson of raping her...

To Walk in Dignity: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955

Although Dr Martin Luther King’s role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott was significant, it has drawn attention away from the key grassroots leaders that initiated the protest that transformed into an internationally significant social justice movement. Carson highlights the grassroots leaders and their roles that...

The Roles of Children and Young People During the Civil Rights Movement

On September 18th, 1963 Dr. King gave a sermon titled “Eulogy for Martyred Children”, to a room filled with the grieving friends and family of 14-year-old Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson and 11- year-old Denise McNair. Within this speech he beautifully outlined...

Racial Injustices in Education Sector in America

The United States has one of the most questionable histories for a country that prides itself to be the land of the free. The prestige has been besmirched by tragedies which have taken place on American soil, by American citizens, and under American laws. The...

Racial Stereotypes Only Send a Negative Message to the Society

We encounter stereotypes in our everyday lives. It is very common for people to find themselves in a situation where they are being stereotyped. We also often place ourselves in situations where there are discrimination, racial prejudice, and racism. We live in a world where...

Comparative Analysis of Narrative of a Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass and Between the World and Me by Ta-nehisi Coates

Coates starts off the book by showing his audience that he is writing a letter to his son “Samori. ” Coats tells his son that he was asked a question, the question was “What does it mean to lose your body? ” Coats clearly says...

The Role of Metropolitan Zoning in Racial and Income Segregation

Since the early 1900s, zoning in some way has shaped many metropolitan areas in the United States. Zoning defines how a jurisdiction plans to use each parcel of land, with this there are positive and negative impacts. In Chicago, we see issues with segregation which...

The Issues of Racism, Racial Boundaries, and Religion in South Park

South Park is known to be one of the biggest comedic reflections of American pop culture. The show, since its release back in 1997, has pushed limits with various categories in American society over the years. The writers of South Park are extremely attentive of...

Racial Discrimination in Public Health Services in the United States

Racism is a practice that consists of offering unfavorable treatment or underserved contempt to a certain person or group and also occurs in the health sector. This behavior that could be considered unethical has also been registered in public health services in the United States. ...

The Controversy and Relevance of the "N" Word

The event that I attended to was about the relevance of saying the “n” word and the controversy behind it. Has it been long enough to let bygones be bygones? Why does anyone have to use it anymore? Why won't it just go away? Do...

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