Segregation and Desegregation
In the early years of the American colonies and the new republic of the United States, segregation was not only impractical but undesirable. To benefit from slavery, slave masters had to manage and control slaves; therefore, they had to work with them. Not all slaves were field hands or agricultural workers; some were domestic servants, and so the slave master and mistress had to share their private quarters with slaves. Thus, many white Americans, especially Southerners in the pre-Civil War South, accepted daily, intimate, personal, primary face-to-face contact with slaves as a necessity. They insisted, however, that all such contacts reflect proper social distance: slaves were always to be subservient, behavioral assimilation was allowed only to a point, and slaves were supposed to know the dominant-group culture, use it appropriately, and always recognize that they were not the equals of their masters. Although structural assimilation occurred at a primary level, it was not among equals.
With the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, some Americans seriously considered the idea of separating blacks and whites. As some blacks emigrated to poor urban areas in the South and as their numbers increased, some whites recognized that blacks were becoming a threat to the hard-won victories of higher-priced white labor (Bonacich 1972).
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