The concept of segregation is usually based on race, gender, class, religion, or ethnicity, depending on the circumstances under which it is practiced. This entry will mainly address racial and ethnic segregation and when appropriate address how it spawned gender and class segregation in the Americas and Africa.
The concept of segregation in the United States was different from segregation in other parts of the Americas, although all practiced slavery that affected the indigenous population. Segregation, with the exception of the United States, was not codified into law. Throughout the colonial and slavery periods in Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean, people of European descent maintained a …
The concept of segregation in Africa will be discussed within the context of the colonial period. Segregation was defined as a hierarchy with Europeans on top; Indians, Arabs, other ethnic groups, and mixed-race people (depending on the colony) in the middle; and Africans on the bottom. In settler colonies such as South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, segregation was not solely defined in racial te…
During the seventeenth century, when Europeans arrived in what later became the United States, the intellectual ideas that supported the segregation of people of European descent from the American Indians was predicated on the belief that Europeans were culturally superior. The idea that education and conversion to Christianity could civilize American Indians was abandoned because they were though…
Africans, Asians, Arabs, and mixed-race people in Africa were viewed through the same cultural lens—Europeans were inherently superior, and Africans were the most inferior. They were uncivilized, lazy, and childlike in their behavior. They were prone to criminal activities and therefore had to be controlled and segregated for the protection of whites. During the nineteenth and twentieth cen…
The ideas of the 1950s and 1960s that served as the catalyst to end Jim Crow segregation in the United States were not new. Intellectuals such as James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin supported and used the tactics of civil disobedience and mass resistance to end racial segregation. For example, James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality, used Mahatma Gandhi's p…
Cell, John W. The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Fredrickson, George M. The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Hamilton, Charles V., et al., eds. Beyo…
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