Calendar photo caption: The effects of racially segregated schools in the North and mass protests by white parents against busing can still be felt today. Across the country, schools with at least 90% nonwhite students spend $733 less per student than schools that are 90% white. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Though often associated exclusively with Southern states, racial segregation was prevalent outside the South.
As some six million Black Americans fled the South beginning in 1910, segregation in other parts of the country intensified and spread to almost every area of life, including public pools and recreational facilities.
As early as 1914, in California cities like Pasadena and San Bernardino, people of color were allowed in publicly funded pools only one day a week, after which the pools were promptly drained and cleaned. States and localities across the North, including Cairo, Illinois, and Flint, Michigan, adopted similar policies.
When municipalities began to integrate pools in response to changes in the law, white attendance at public pools plummeted and private pools emerged. Many communities closed their public pools altogether rather than allow Black people to use them.
White people across America actively segregated entire cities by race, adopting sundown policies, redlining, and restrictive covenants.
Property owners added racially restrictive covenants to their property deeds that effectively barred Black prospective homeowners from entire neighborhoods. From 1910 to the 1960s, these covenants proliferated in Seattle, where deeds provided that "no part of the lands owned...shall ever be used or occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to negroes, or any person or person[s] of the negro blood." Now unenforceable, many homeowners across America still have racially restrictive covenants in their property deeds.
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