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Following the abolition of slavery by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the United States experienced a century of legally regulated racial segregation. In the Southern States, the Jim Crow laws (named after a racist caricature from a popular song) pursued a strict separation between the white and black populations at local and state level: from separate schools, hospitals, and restaurants to separate trains, public toilets, parks and cemeteries. The Supreme Court approved these segregation laws, basing its decision on the concept of 'separate but equal'. Since the individual states were themselves responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure was equal for all, this concept was of course never reality. In this way, a racist policy was pursued in the South that closely resembled the apartheid that came later in South Africa. Only in 1964, and under the pressure of civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Civil Rights Act prohibited all segregation by law. Although “equality before the law” has existed since then, discrimination remains a reality in many areas of the United States until today.

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