Segregation

A sign erected on city property by police on 31 October 1961.

Segregation is the legal or customary separation of racial, ethnic, or national groups within a society, and in its most historically notable form the system of forced separation of African Americans from whites that prevailed in the United States. Worst in the former slave states of the South, which spanned from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s. Segregation was a product and instrument of class society.

Segregation and racial terror did not follow immediately upon the abolition of slavery, in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the freed slaves won citizenship and the right to vote, and for roughly a decade a significant democratic advance was registered by the African Americans and in some places, interracial political cooperation between the black and white working class. Two decades later, judicial rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson and primarily the Compromise of 1877, led to the Jim Crow laws being established. That is not to say though, that there weren’t any lynchings during the Reconstruction.

”Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, points out in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the Southern masses divided and Southern labor the cheapest in the land.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr, Our God is Marching On! Speech in Montgomery, Alabama.

History

Racism and segregation was a means to the end of political control and, through that, class domination. It was precisely the threat of the unity of black and white sharecroppers, poor farmers, and workers that drove the ruling class to institutionalize racial segregation and to encourage racist terror.

The Compromise of 1877, installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederacy. Having established its victory through the Civil War, the Northern bourgeoisie was willing to make a deal with its former foes and this deal allowed the Southern states to establish the Jim Crow system of segregation, terror, and second-class citizenship.

Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and the separate but equal doctrine codified in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, disenfranchised the vast majority of black people but also many poor whites. Voter turnout collapsed across the country, most extreme in the Deep South, where a small number of white and wealthy voters were eligible.

The 1898 white supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which an white armed mob overthrew a legally elected multiracial government, murdered masses of black workers, and expelled elected black citizens. It was carried out by leading business and military figures who would succeed within the Democratic Party. The federal government's refusal to intervene was not accidental.

The Great Migration of millions of African Americans from agricultural labor in the South to urban wage labor in the North created the social basis for organized struggle alongside the building of the industrial unions. It was from this the civil rights movement was born which achieved the abolition of legal segregation and the ruling class made these concessions only under the pressure of mass struggle during the short postwar period of American capitalist reform. But these concessions were never extended to the economic and social sphere and even the legal reforms faced strong resistance by the southern wing of the Democratic Party.

Since the 1970s, there has been a social counterrevolution, the ruling class rolled back social reform while promoting affirmative action and black capitalism which allowed them to elevate upper-middle-class African-Americans into positions of power while gutting public education, housing, and social services for the working class as a whole which disproportionally hit the working-class African-American communities.

Income segregation in urban areas has the visuals of being simultaneously racial. Nearly 80 percent of highly segregated schools are found in highly impoverished districts, whereas elite black families, like their white counterparts, can buy access to the prestigious schools.