For much of its history, American society separated whites from minorities. In the 1800s, for example, white settlers seeking land forced many Native Americans to move to reservations. Jim Crow laws required whites and blacks to use separate public facilities as recently as the 1960s. Social customs and local ordinances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often insisted that Hispanic Americans and people of Asian descent live in racially segregated neighborhoods. Even white ethnic minorities—Jews and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—were excluded from many residential areas until the middle of the twentieth century.

Numerous historians argue, however, that segregation by law and by custom has had its most profound impact on African Americans. As proof, they point to the fact that the status of African Americans has been the subject of much of the controversy and legislation involving race. In the 1896 case of...