US Jim Crow (“American apartheid”)
A scholarly analogy, not a legal finding
From the late 19th century into the 1960s, US law (especially in the South) enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement of Black Americans under “separate but equal.” Scholars — notably Massey and Denton in American Apartheid (1993) — use the apartheid comparison, but no court or international body has adjudicated Jim Crow as the crime of apartheid.
What happened
The Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) entrenched “separate but equal,” licensing decades of segregation laws. A century later, sociologists framed the resulting residential segregation as “American apartheid,” arguing it produced and sustained a Black urban underclass.
American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. (Massey & Denton, American Apartheid, 1993 — publisher’s description)
Under each definition
Jim Crow predates the 1973 Convention; used only by analogy.
Predates the 1998 Statute; no legal application.
Strong parallels in segregation and disenfranchisement, but scholars debate how close the analogy is.
“American apartheid” is a widely used analogical description.
The case that the label applies
Jim Crow was a legally mandated racial-separation system (segregated schools, transport, housing, disenfranchisement) that resembles the mechanisms named in the apartheid definitions; the comparison is well established in scholarship.
The case against
This is an analogy, not a legal finding. Both treaties postdate Jim Crow, the US never ratified the Apartheid Convention, and no court has labelled Jim Crow “apartheid.” Scholars also stress structural differences (decentralized state law; Black Americans a minority, not a majority).
In their words
This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Only South Africa is beyond dispute; every other legal characterization is attributed to the body that made it. The lenses diverge most on the treaties’ phrase “racial group” and on the difference between a legal finding and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.