Because other people wrong believed that the races should not mix, that contamination would occur if the races did mix.

In a nutshell, people fear what they don't understand. Fear breeds things like hate, and prejudice and when people hate something, often times they don't bother to get to know exactly why. "White people" feared and hated black people because they thought they were superior, but instead were ignorant about the situation and thought that doing the same things and touching the same things and going to the same places as a black person, was bad.

black people were not segregated. the schools and public places were segregated against black people. the black people were discriminated against because of people that that believed that people of different color shouldn't be mixed.

People do not like what appears different to them. Also people associate simpler lives with simpler intelligence, so, when the Arabs and Europeans saw the Africans, they thought: primitive, and made them slaves. Slavery reinforced the view of superiority/inferiority because slaves were uneducated (deliberately) and expected to act like children before their masters. Sadly, even after the freeing of the slaves, the attitudes remained, some say still remain. It will take many generations before the ingrained reacism dissipates... I think this is the same for any subjugated group throughout the world...

Racism mostly. There were restaurants, clubs, schools, hospitals (the list goes on and on) of public places that were *White Only*. There were even *White Only* water bubblers. This was mostly because of hatred, but a lot of it was just *Whites* pushing their weight around (which, under those circumstances, was not seen as illegal, or immoral) with those people that they considered to be of lower status or intelligence.....

Originally, most black people in this country were brought here as slaves. Why were they considered inferior? You'll get a lot of answers to that, but in my opinion it was because it's damned hard to take freedom away from a fellow human being. So we needed to make the psychological shift to start regarding them as less than human, so that we could subjigate them without feeling as bad about it. It started out innocently enough, as indentured servitude, but then we got worried about what would happen when they finally gained their freedom. So we made them slaves for life. Then we started worrying about whether their children would seek revenge and so we made the children into slaves as well. So then we had a huge amount invested in denying the black anger a chance to vent itself. That continues to this day. Deep down in our psyche we are still afraid that the angry black man will rise up and conquer us if given a chance. We didn't want to face that issue so we made sure that we didn't have to see them in situations where we would be equals. We needed to keep them as inferiors in order now to deal with the shame of our past treatment and the fear of future retribution. That's my take on it, at any rate.