Colonization Glossary

The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP (Grand Old Party), is one of the two major political parties in the United States; the other is its historic rival, the Democratic Party.

The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed for the potential expansion of slavery into certain U.S. territories. The party supported classical liberalism, opposed the expansion of slavery, and supported economic reform. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, slavery was banned in the United States in 1865. The Party was generally dominant during the Third Party System and the Fourth Party System. After 1912, the Party underwent an ideological shift to the right. Following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party's core base shifted, with Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics. Since the 1990s, the Party's support has chiefly come from the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States and rural areas in the North.

Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, refers to the segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation in the United States along racial lines.

The term mainly refers to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from European Americans, but it is also used with regards to the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as the separation of roles within an institution. Notably, in the United States Armed Forces up until 1948, black units were typically separated from white units but were nevertheless still led by white officers.

Racial segregation is the systemic separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races. Specifically, it may be applied to activities such as eating in restaurants, drinking from water fountains, using public toilets, attending schools, going to movies, riding buses, renting or purchasing homes or renting hotel rooms.

On 20 March 1924, the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws that arose out of concerns about eugenics and race, the second being: SB 219 entitled 'The Racial Integrity Act.' To put it in context, there were no other laws in the State of Virginia or in other states that had formally tackled this issue, and thus its importance as the first such law in United States history. With respect to its relation with eugenics, the passing of this Act was influenced by the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 due, according to the PBS American Experience documentary 'The Eugenics Crusade,' to the number of cases reported by doctors where they found genetic traits in whites that are also found in what they perceived as other races - African Americans or Native Americans in particular.The Racial Integrity Act required a racial description of every resident in the State of Virginia be recorded at-birth into two primary classifications: white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous Native Americans). It defined race by the famous 'one-drop rule' in which any non white ancestry rendered the subject a 'colored' person. In 1967, this Act as well as the Virginia Sterilization Act was officially overturned by the United States Supreme Court in their ruling 'Loving v. Virginia.'