Jim Crow Laws
From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine performed beginning in 1828 by its author,Thomas Dartmouth Rice. Since the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures passed laws which required whites to stay separated from the blacks anywhere (such as restaurants, drinking fountains, sports, etc). It was awfully rude for a black and a white to socialize.