Portal:Discrimination/Selected picture/1

A sign points the way to a "Colored Waiting Room", outside a Greyhound bus station in Rome, Georgia, United States, in 1943. The sign refers to a room where blacks were allowed to wait for the bus; "colored" was the common euphemism for African Americans at the time, especially in the Southern United States, though the term is now considered offensive.

The provision of separate facilities for white people and black people was the result of a series of state laws, collectively nicknamed Jim Crow laws, making racial segregation the rule of law in many Southern states beginning in 1876. While these laws decreed that such provisions were to be "separate but equal", in practice facilities provided for whites were assuredly of better quality and maintenance than those for blacks. Various Jim Crow laws remained in effect until they were made illegal throughout the U.S. by the Civil Rights Act of 1965.