Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South – thinly veiled monuments to the long, strange, dehumanizing history of segregation

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Rodney Coates, Miami University

(THE CONVERSATION) No 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 Plessy v. Ferguson, the Jim Crow laws and customs that emerged required Black and white people to be separated in virtually every part of life. They used separate restrooms, sat in separate sections on trains and buses and drank from separate water fountains.

Even in death, Black and white people were buried in separate cemeteries.

Though the racist practice of separate accommodations was officially outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, relics from the past still linger today.

In Ellisville, Mississippi, for instance, two water fountains remain standing in front of the Jones County Courthouse. When they were first built in the late 1930s, the words “white” and “colored” designated which fountain was to be used by which race.

Over the years, those words were covered up by different ceremonial plaques. But for some Black Ellisville residents, the fountains still stir up painful memories of...