Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South – thinly veiled monuments to the long, strange, dehumanizing history of segregation
- Written by Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University
In this 1938 image, a Black boy uses a fountain marked 'colored' at a North Carolina county courthouse.Getty ImagesNo one knows for certain when public facilities like bathrooms and drinking fountains were separated by race.
But starting in the 1890s, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized “separate but equal” in P...