History of Segregation
Clayton Cramer takes issue with my characterization of the roots of segregation:
Different River asks how segregation could have collapsed so quickly:
how else could a centuries-old system have collapsed in less than two decades?
The problem with this question is that segregation was not a centuries-old system. Segregation was largely a post-Civil War phenomenon. De Tocqueville (among others) noticed that in the South, blacks and whites socialized and engaged in public amusements together in a way that simply did not happen in the North. Under slavery, there was no practical way to segregate housing, because slaves lived on the owner’s plantation (with a few exceptions for absentee owners and some urban slaves), and of course, schooling wasn’t an issue: most slave states made it unlawful to educate a slave, and many of the Southern states didn’t even have public schools until just before (and in some cases, just after) the Civil War.
Allow me to clarify:
By “a centuries-old system” I did not mean “segregated facilities,” but rather, “a system in which blacks retain rights inferior to those retained by whites.”
As such, the period of slavery is included because most blacks were slaves and no whites were (i.e., whites had the inherent right not to be enslaved), and even free blacks did not,in general, have the same rights as whites. Racial segregation was simply not necessary when everyone could assume that any blacks they saw were slaves, and be right almost all the time. It’s true that schools were not segregated — but as Mr. Cramer points out, that’s because it was illegal to educate slaves (and I believe in some states, free blacks as well). I consider that a rather extreme form of segregated schooling, not the absence of segregation. As for housing, physical separation was simply moot when when everyone could assume that any blacks they saw were slaves, and be right almost all the time.
Racism — by which in this case I mean not how people feel but how people act — was quite old, probably occasioned by the interaction between the psychological need to justify slavery when the conscience knows it’s wrong, and the fact that nearly all blacks were slaves and (nearly?) all slaves were black.
