Racial segregation in the United States included the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from White Americans, as well as the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority communities. Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment and transportation in the United States have been systematically separated based on racial categorizations. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), so long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided, a requirement that was rarely met. The doctrine's applicability to public schools was unanimously overturned in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and several landmark cases including Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964) further ruled against racial segregation, helping to bring an end to the Jim Crow laws. During the civil rights movement, de jure segregation was formally outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, while de facto segregation continues today in areas including residential segregation and school segregation, as part of ongoing racism and discrimination in the United States. This photograph, taken in 1939 by Russell Lee, shows an African-American man drinking at a water dispenser, with a sign reading "Colored", in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City.
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