What Was Life Like Under Segregation?

Imagine living in a country where your skin colour determined which water fountain you could drink from, which door you entered a building through, which schools your children attended, and whether you could vote. This was reality for Black Americans in the South until the 1960s. Jim Crow laws (state laws named after a racist caricature that enforced racial separation in all public life) enforced strict separation of races in every aspect of life. The 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson had ruled this was legal as long as facilities were "separate but equal" — but they were never equal.