Desegregation in the United States

Desegregation is the process of ending racial segregation, most usually used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the U.S. civil rights movement, particularly desegregation of the school systems, and the military (See African-Americans in the United States military before desegregation), as was the closely related but somewhat more ambitious goal of racial integration.

Both racial segregation and integration in the United States have a long and varied history. For much of American history, beginning in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia when African slaves were sold to the white settlers by Dutch merchants, Black Americans suffered from various social and civil disabilities which were an outgrowth of the institution of slavery. The extent to which white racial supremacy was practiced varied from state to state and within a state, even within the South. For example, the original constitution of the state of Tennessee, adopted in 1796, allowed free Blacks the right to vote, while a subsequent one, adopted in 1834, did not.

Reactions to the practice of slavery and what should be the proper response to it were varied, also, among its opponents. Some of those who called for Abolition were equally adamant that upon being freed, Blacks should be transported to Africa (the nation of Liberia was an outgrowth of this mindset), while others called for immediate racial integration to be what took the place of slavery. While the practice of slavery was outlawed in the U.S. after the American Civil War, many of its effects were not.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, made all persons born in the United States citizens, overturning the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (better known as the Dred Scott decision) to the effect that no Black could be a citizen of the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment, coupled with the subsequently ratified Fifteenth Amendment, meant that in theory all Black men over twenty-one could now legally vote if they were literate in English. During the Reconstruction years many had the opportunity to do so, but thereafter, in practice, few were actually allowed to do so. After the ending of the Freedmens Bureau and other institutions of Reconstruction in the South, Federal officials decided that the enforcement of voting rights was strictly a state matter, an attitude not totally discredited until the United States Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 almost a century later.

During the Civil War, Blacks were enlisted in large numbers in the Union Army, particularly in the later stages of the war, but served in segregated units under the command of white officers. While a handful of Blacks were commissioned as officers in World War I white officers remained the rule in that conflict as well, and carried over in large part into World War II also.

Racial integration was handed a huge setback in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require facilities to be racially integrated as long as they were "equal", and this "separate but equal" doctrine prevailed for well over a half-century until it was reversed in 1954 by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, in which the court found that racially separate facilities were inherently unequal. Things hardly stood still in between, however. In 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded to foster racial integration and fair treatment toward citizens of color. One of the founders of this group was the brilliant Black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois Other important groups fostering integration were the Congress of Racial Equality, the Urban League, and, later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Racial integration was also encouraged by the leaders of most Jewish groups and of some labor unions, although other unions vigorously opposed it, especially at first.

One of the greatest advances for racial integration was the order by President Harry S. Truman to racially integrate the armed forces shortly after World War II, which he had the authority to do under Executive Order without the need for any enabling legislation to be passed by Congress, where it likely would have met with strident opposition, particularly from representatives of many of the Southern states.

In 1957, in the wake of the Brown decision, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower enforced the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation order by sending troops to Little Rock, Arkansas when the Governor of the state resisted allowing black students (known as the Little Rock Nine) to attend the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower used United States Army troops, when Governor Orval Faubus had mobilized troops from the Arkansas National Guard to prevent it, setting a precedent for the enforcement of court orders relating to racial integration by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. (See also: Little Rock Integration Crisis.)

The greatest growth of racial integration occurred as a result of the Civil Rights movement. The best-known spokesman for racial integration during the Civil Rights era was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. As a result of the movement, almost all of the legal basis for racial segregation was removed and the primary barriers to racial integration remained social and customary ones, which could not be repealed as could laws. As legal barriers came down and members of the races began to interact more freely, the dream of racial integration began to be more of a reality. Still, the United States remains somewhat segregated in housing patterns, although far less so than previously, and very segregated religiously; nearly all of the leading Protestant denominations still have predominantly white and predominantly black bodies, although there is a slow spread of racially integrated ones, particularly among the Pentecostal and community church movements.

In the 1971 case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that forced busing of students may be ordered to achieve racial desegregation.

The impediments to a truly racially-integrated American society now come from many directions. Some are overtly racist white groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which although far less influential than in times past still has many followers of its various factions. Other opponents of integration are Black nationalists and religious movements such as the Black Muslims, who teach racial separation and black supremacy, in stark contrast to mainstream Islam. Racial integration must be viewed not as a fait accompli in the United States, but rather as work in progress.