When we think about segregation in America, it’s tempting to relegate it to the distant past—a shameful era captured in grainy black-and-white photographs that feels disconnected from modern life. But the truth is far more unsettling: legal segregation ended so recently that millions of Americans alive today were born into a segregated society.
The commonly cited endpoint for segregation is 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2nd. This landmark legislation prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and it specifically outlawed segregation in public accommodations like restaurants, theaters, and hotels. The following year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters through literacy tests and other discriminatory practices.These dates—1964 and 1965—are barely sixty years ago. To put this in perspective, anyone born before these laws were passed is still under retirement age. Your parents or grandparents likely remember a time when “Whites Only” signs hung in shop windows and water fountains were divided by race. The comedian and actor Richard Pryor, the musician Tina Turner, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas were all born into a legally segregated America. Morgan Freeman attended segregated schools. So did Oprah Winfrey.
But even these dates don’t tell the complete story, because the end of legal segregation didn’t mean the immediate end of segregated institutions. The implementation of desegregation met fierce resistance across the country, particularly in the South. When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, the decision was met with massive resistance. Some districts closed their public schools entirely rather than integrate them. Prince Edward County in Virginia shut down its entire public school system from 1959 to 1964, leaving Black children without access to education for five years.School desegregation dragged on for decades after Brown. In many Southern cities, meaningful integration didn’t occur until the 1970s. The famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being harassed by an angry mob as she tried to attend Little Rock Central High School was taken in 1957. Ruby Bridges, who became the first Black child to attend a previously all-white elementary school in Louisiana, walked through crowds of screaming protesters in 1960—she’s only in her sixties today and still actively speaks about her experiences.
Boston didn’t begin court-ordered busing to desegregate its schools until 1974, sparking violent protests and riots that made national headlines. The images from Boston—white parents throwing rocks at school buses carrying Black children—were captured in color photography, not the black-and-white of the 1950s. These events happened after the moon landing, after Woodstock, in the same era as disco and the Watergate scandal.
Even after the legal framework of segregation crumbled, its architecture remained embedded in American society. Banks continued redlining—the practice of denying mortgages or offering worse terms to people in predominantly Black neighborhoods—well into the 1970s and beyond, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Many neighborhoods, suburbs, and institutions remained effectively segregated through economic barriers, discriminatory lending practices, and informal social codes.
Swimming pools offer a particularly stark example of how desegregation unfolded. Throughout the South and in many Northern cities, public pools had been strictly segregated. When courts ordered them integrated in the 1950s and 1960s, many municipalities simply closed their public pools rather than allow Black and white children to swim together. Some pools were filled with concrete. Others were sold to private clubs that could legally remain segregated. The closures happened so recently that the physical evidence remains: empty pool basins, now used as skateboard parks or filled in as parking lots, dot cities across America.
Interracial marriage provides another lens into how recent these changes were. The Supreme Court didn’t strike down laws banning interracial marriage until Loving v. Virginia in 1967—meaning such marriages were illegal in sixteen states until then. Alabama didn’t remove the unenforceable ban from its state constitution until 2000, and even then, forty percent of voters opposed removing it.Universities desegregated on different timelines. While some Border State universities admitted Black students in the late 1940s and 1950s, the University of Alabama wasn’t integrated until 1963, when Governor George Wallace literally stood in the schoolhouse door trying to block Black students from enrolling. The University of Mississippi erupted in riots in 1962 when James Meredith became its first Black student, requiring federal troops to restore order. Many private universities in the South remained all-white even longer.
The persistence of segregation extended into professional and social spheres as well. Major League Baseball didn’t integrate until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, but the Boston Red Sox didn’t field a Black player until 1959—making them the last team to integrate. Many country clubs, professional organizations, and social institutions remained segregated by custom, if not by law, well into the 1980s and 1990s. Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters Tournament, didn’t admit its first Black member until 1990.Perhaps most strikingly, many Americans who experienced legal segregation are still active participants in public life. Civil rights icon John Lewis served in Congress until his death in 2020, bridging the era of segregation to the present day. Countless teachers, doctors, lawyers, and professionals now in their sixties, seventies, and eighties attended segregated schools, drank from segregated water fountains, and navigated a world where their race determined where they could eat, sleep, learn, and work.
The recency of segregation’s end becomes even more apparent when you consider generational timelines. If you’re in your thirties or forties, your parents likely grew up during the civil rights movement. Your grandparents were adults during the height of Jim Crow. This isn’t ancient history passed down through multiple generations—it’s the lived experience of people who are still here, still working, still raising families, still shaping our society.
Understanding how recent segregation was matters because it helps explain persistent inequalities in wealth, education, housing, and opportunity. The effects of centuries of slavery followed by a century of legal segregation don’t disappear the moment laws change. When Black families were systematically denied the ability to buy homes in appreciating neighborhoods, to attend well-funded schools, to access the same business loans and professional opportunities as white families, the wealth gap that created compounds across generations. A Black family whose grandparents were denied a mortgage in a suburb that later appreciated in value starts with fundamentally less generational wealth than a white family who bought in that same neighborhood in 1950.
The end of legal segregation in the 1960s marked a crucial turning point in American history, but it wasn’t an ending so much as a beginning—the start of an ongoing process of dismantling systems and mindsets built over centuries. When we grasp how recent these changes were, we better understand why their effects are still so visible in American society today. The distance between then and now is shockingly short—short enough that we can still hear firsthand accounts, short enough that the same people who experienced segregation as children are now grandparents themselves, short enough that we should never make the mistake of thinking it’s comfortably in the past.
