# Segregation The legal and social system of enforced racial separation in the United States — in law from the 1890s to the 1960s in the South, in practice everywhere and still — and the fact around which the vault's account of the American right's twentieth-century realignment turns. De jure segregation was the [[Jim Crow Era]]'s statute book: separate schools, railcars, waiting rooms, water fountains, cemeteries, Bibles for witnesses, upheld by *Plessy v. Ferguson* (1896) under the fiction of "separate but equal" and enforced by disfranchisement, the [[Colfax Massacre (1873)]]-era paramilitaries and the lynching regime. De facto segregation was the North's version: restrictive covenants, [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]], school-district lines drawn around neighborhoods the covenants had made, and a federal housing policy that financed the white suburb and refused the Black one. ## The end and its politics *[[Brown v. Board of Education]]* (1954) declared school segregation unconstitutional and set off [[Massive Resistance]] — the Southern Manifesto, the closed schools, the interposition resolutions, the revived [[Confederate Battle Flag]] — until the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the Voting Rights Act made the legal system untenable. What the vault tracks is the political consequence. The white South's defense of segregation, first inside the [[Democratic Party]] ([[Dixiecrats]], 1948) and then outside it, is the engine of the realignment that made the [[Republican Party]] the party of the South by 1980: Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act, Nixon's Southern strategy, Reagan at Neshoba County ([[States' Rights]]). The right's account is that the realignment was about economics and religion, not race; the evidence on this page's neighbors — the [[Segregation Academies]] that became the Christian-school movement, the tax-exemption fight over Bob Jones University that mobilized the religious right, the busing wars that turned Northern white ethnics — is that the categories were never separate. ## Now Schools are more segregated today than in 1980 by most measures, the product of residential patterns and the Supreme Court's retreat from remedies (*Milliken* 1974, *Parents Involved* 2007); the [[Pacific Legal Foundation]] and the anti-[[Affirmative Action]] litigation completed the doctrinal reversal in 2023. The word itself is now contested in the other direction — the right's argument that affinity spaces and race-conscious policy are "the new segregation" — which is the [[Colorblindness]] debate. [[The Grays and the Blues]] has the regional map; [[Great Migration]] the demographic response. ## See Also - [[Jim Crow Era]] · [[Massive Resistance]] · [[Dixiecrats]] · [[Brown v. Board of Education]] · [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] · [[States' Rights]] - [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]] · [[Segregation Academies]] · [[Great Migration]] · [[Colorblindness]] · [[Affirmative Action]] - [[Democratic Party]] · [[Republican Party]] · [[The Grays and the Blues]] · [[Confederate Battle Flag]]