Academic literature on the topic 'Prevent Race-Mixing'

Abstract During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the relatively new term “segregation” was at the center of public discourse about race relations in both the United States and South Africa. Its principal use was to describe new laws and public policies designed to increase the physical separation of blacks and whites. In the United States, the word was first used in this way during the 1890s when southern states began passing laws that required separate accommodation for blacks and whites in railroads, passenger boats, and streetcars. In South Africa, it originated shortly after the turn of the century, and from the beginning referred mainly to proposals for controlling interactions between whites and Africans by dividing the country up between “native reserves” and the much larger area where white interests and prerogatives would be firmly entrenched. The common element of both forms of segregation was the use of law and governmental action, in a more systematic and comprehensive way than had been attempted previously, to prevent any mixing of the races that might conceivably engender conflict and threaten white dominance or social superiority. If segregation means simply the enforced social or territorial separation of dominant and subaltern “races,” the practice (if not the term) had a long history in both countries. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, black and white Americans lived thoroughly separate social lives in cities like Philadelphia, a division that prevailed even among incarcerated criminals and beyond the grave in the form of separate burial grounds.