Oklahoma Law Requires Separate Telephone Booths for Black and White Users

Oklahoma's first Jim Crow law, among the first acts of its newly formed legislature in 1907, required separate telephone booths for Black and white users. The law epitomized the totalizing nature of Jim Crow segregation — penetrating even brief impersonal commercial transactions. Such laws served not primarily a practical purpose but a symbolic one: the constant enforcement and performance of racial hierarchy in every aspect of daily life.