Examples of U.S. Laws Requiring Racial Segregation
The United States passed more than four-hundred laws, amendments, and ordinances legalizing discrimination and segregation between the years of 1865 and 1967. Nearly all aspects of people's everyday lives were governed by these laws including, but not limited to, health care, education, public transportation, housing, and public facilities. While these laws were most prevalent in the South, they were passed in the North as well.
EDUCATION
Mississippi: Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.
New Mexico: Separate rooms shall be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent.
North Carolina: School textbooks shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.
ENTERTAINMENT
Alabama: It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided.
Georgia: It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.
Louisiana: All circuses, shows, and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of more than one race is invited shall provide not less than two ticket offices and not less than two entrances.
Virginia: Any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or place of public entertainment which is attended by both white and colored persons shall separate the white race and the colored race.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Mississippi: Any person guilty of printing, publishing or circulating matter urging or presenting arguments in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
HEALTH CARE
Alabama: No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.
Mississippi: There shall be maintained by every state hospital . . . separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.
HOUSING
Louisiana: Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
Mississippi: The prison warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.
LIBRARIES
Texas: Negroes are to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by a custodian of the negro race under the supervision of the county librarian.
North Carolina: The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals.
MARRIAGE
Arizona: The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro shall be null and void.
Florida: Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room, shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding 12 months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars.
Maryland: All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive…are forever prohibited, and shall be void.
Wyoming: All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are, and shall be, illegal and void.
SERVICES
Georgia: No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls.
Georgia: The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.
TRANSPORTATION
Alabama: All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.
Maryland: All railroad companies are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers.
Creator | Various
Item Type | Laws/Court Cases
Cite This document | Various, “Examples of U.S. Laws Requiring Racial Segregation,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed April 24, 2024, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/875.
