For the first half of the 1900s, white and black people in America were separated by law. Across the land, blacks and whites ate at separate restaurants, or in separate parts of restaurants. They bathed in separate swimming pools, and drank from separate water fountains.
Separated societies
The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) wrote into law that this was acceptable. America would have two separate societies: one black and one white. It was permitted to keep the people apart, the ruling said, as long as the two were considered equal, as it says in the Constitution: "All men are created equal." After the Civil War, when many African-American slaves became free, white people in the North and South lost power. They looked to regain it by creating Jim Crow laws that separated
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Change began brewing in the late 1940s. President Harry Truman ordered the end of segregation in the military. Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play Major League Baseball. But the wall built by Jim Crow laws seemed impossible to overcome. The first major battleground was in the schools. It was very clear by the 1950s that southern states had intentionally built separate school systems. These schools, however, were never equal. States with segregated schools never gave equal amounts of money to their black and white schools. Teachers in white schools were paid better wages, school buildings for white students were maintained more carefully, and money for school supplies was more available in white schools. States normally spent 10 to 20 times on the education of white students as they spent on African-American students. Lawyer Thurgood Marshall led a group called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The group sued public schools across the South. They said that the promise of "separate but equal" institutions had been