Walls and Barriers-What is Segregation?

Segregation is the act of separating either a person or a group of people from the rest of society for reasons like race, religion, and culture. It involves unequal treatment to the people being separated; for example, Black people were thought of as inferior to White people and were treated as lower beings. This treatment caused uprising among Black people.

Rosa Parks, a Black woman born in Tuskegee, Alabama, rebelled against this unfair treatment by refusing to move from her seat so a White person could sit there. She did not give in when 3 other people moved and did not mind when the bus driver had her arrested. Here is a quote from Rosa Parks from her autobiography "My Story". "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Later on, Rosa Parks became active human rights movements with Martin Luther King Jr.


Another form of segregation was the harsh treatment of Jews. In Europe, Jews were forced to live in ghettos and were top of the list when Hitler was rising in power during WW11 to be sent to concentration camps. Hitler had an extreme dislike towards Jews and tried to eliminate all of them. 11 million people were killed during WW11 and 6 million of them were Jews. Luckily, nowadays Jews are much better off than they were 60 years ago.

Segregation still exists in society today, but a lot of obstacles have been overcome and are being overcome. In 1968, racial segregation was outlawed and many people realized that treating others as lower life forms was unjust. The forms of segregation that you might come across would be a boss not hiring someone because of racial or cultural reasons or a person not being able to buy a house because of racial or cultural reasons.



This post is part of the El Anatsui: Walls and Barriers project :P