In the decades preceding the creation of the Sutro Baths, civil rights were expanding, but Jim Crow laws and segregation were everywhere in public settings. Laws mandated racial separation in transportation, restrooms, parks, and drinking fountains.
The Daily National Republican Newspaper, March 31, 1870
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
"This is the crowing act in the total and entire emancipation of the colored race."
The Fifteenth Amendment allowed men of all races to vote but African Americans faced deliberate barriers to voting, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, discriminatory laws, and intimidation.
"Jim Crow laws created and enforced racial segregated public facilities, from schools and bathrooms to movie theaters and laundromats."
Publication, Howard University Law Library
Racist Jim Crow caricature, 1832
Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
In 1892, Homer Plessy volunteered to test the legality of railroad car segregation.
Courtesy of The National Museum of African American History & Culture
Plessy V. Ferguson (1896) upheld state segregation laws, ruling they did not violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
Homer Plessy
Courtesy of The Advocate
"The destinies of the two races, in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law."
Justice John Marshall Harlan, lone dissenting judge in the Plessy v. Ferguson case
Courtesy of Open San Francisco History
In 1851, San Francisco's first public schools were exclusively for white children. Segregated schools for Black children appeared in 1854. In 1860, the Black population of the city was only a fraction of the total census, growing by fewer than 500 by 1900, for a total of 1,654 Black individuals out of 342,782 total.
"Many church members who were black could not worship in the same seating areas as whites in churches and therefore built their own churches. Even though segregation took root in San Francisco and continuted into the 20th century, many African Americans continued the westward movement to California in search of a better life."
Jan Batiste Adkins, in African Americans of San Francisco
However, in the working class population, socializing between racial groups existed.
Black church goers from San Francisco attend a picnic on July 14, 1914.
Courtesy of The Third Baptist Church of San Francisco
as reproduced in African Americans of San Francisco, by J. Adkins
"3 pals," c. 1900, Courtesy of Bancroft Library
as reproduced in FoundSF