“S” is Segregation. Segregation, the residential, political, and social isolation of African Americans was accomplished in South Carolina by a long and varying effort in the aftermath of emancipation and Reconstruction. The de facto, or socially based segregation of the races was channeled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a rigid legal, or de jure system, that effectively forced the second-class citizenship of African Americans. The all-encompassing “Jim Crow” system was constructed through a slow and halting process, which Black Carolinians contested at every turn. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Although the decision marked the end of de jure segregation, resistance to the decision demonstrated that ending de facto segregation continued to be a work in progress.
S” is for Segregation
