CHAPTER FivE • Civil RigHTs 97
De Facto Segregation
Racial segregation that
occurs because of patterns
of racial residence and
similar social conditions.
De Jure Segregation
Racial segregation that
occurs because of laws or
administrative decisions by
public agencies.
Civil Disobedience
A nonviolent, public
refusal to obey allegedly
unjust laws.De Jure and De Facto segregation
The kind of segregation faced by Linda Carol Brown and James Meredith is called de jure
segregation, because it is the result of discriminatory laws or government actions.
(De jure is Latin for “by law.”) A second kind of public school segregation was common
in many northern communities—de facto segregation. This term refers to segregation
that is not due to an explicit law but results from other causes, such as residential patterns.
Neighborhoods inhabited almost entirely by African Americans naturally led to de facto
segregation of the public schools.
Discrimination was still involved, however. In many communities, landlords would
only rent to African Americans in specific districts, and realtors would not allow them to
view houses for sale outside of these zones. In other words, nongovernmental discrimina-
tion confined African Americans to all-black districts, which became known as ghettos.^8
One method used by federal courts in the 1970s and 1980s to address both de jure
and de facto segregation in the public schools was to bus students from black neighbor-
hoods into white ones, and vice versa. Busing proved to be enormously unpopular. In the
mid-1970s, about three-fourths of all whites opposed the policy, as did almost half of all
African Americans. By the 1990s, federal courts were backing away from the practice.
The desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988, and since then the schools
have grown more segregated. Indeed, today, school admissions policies that favor minority
applicants in an attempt to reduce de facto segregation may end up being challenged on
equal protection grounds. (For a further discussion of this issue, see the section on affirma-
tive action later in this chapter.)The Civil Rights movement
The Brown decisions applied only to public schools. Not much else in the structure of
existing segregation was affected. In December 1955, an African American woman, Rosa
Parks, boarded a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. When the bus became crowded,
Parks was asked to move to the rear of the bus, the “colored” section. She refused, was
arrested, and was fined $10. But that was not the end of the matter. For an entire year,
African Americans boycotted the Montgomery bus line. The protest was headed by a
twenty-seven-year-old Baptist minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the face of over-
whelming odds, the protesters won. In 1956, a federal district court issued an injunction
prohibiting the segregation of buses in Montgomery. The era of civil rights protests had
begun.King’s Philosophy of nonviolence. In the following year, 1957, King formed the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King advocated nonviolent civil
disobedience as a means to achieve racial justice. The SCLC used tactics such as dem-
onstrations and marches, as well as nonviolent, public disobedience of unjust laws. King’s
followers successfully used these methods to gain wider public acceptance of their cause.
For the next decade, African Americans and sympathetic whites engaged in sit-ins,
freedom rides, and freedom marches. In the beginning, such demonstrations were often
met with violence, and the contrasting image of nonviolent African Americans and violent,
hostile whites created strong public support for the civil rights movement.- Ghetto was originally the name of a district in Venice, Italy, in which Venetian Jews were required
to live.
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