Short answer: No. Disneyland was never segregated, and welcomed all guests regardless of race. However, for workers, it was highly sexist and racist.

Without wanting to opening a can of worms in regards to the Nazi and Jewish kerfunkle, Walt Disney himself was not explicitly discriminatory. At worst, he was racially uneducated and thoughtless. Take The Song of the South as a great example of what was a good intentioned, olive branch to a black audience, that was ultimately based on stereotypes and coded racism. So apart from some colorful language "of the time," he never is known to say anything explicitly disparaging of any race.

Back to Disneyland. Walt's conception of Disneyland was that it was an immersive, interactive play. Visitors were called guests and employees were called cast members. Cast members were either "on stage" or "off stage" in reference to being in the park where guests can see you or behind the walls in cast member only areas. With this mindset, employees weren't hired but cast.

In less nefarious ways, cast members were required to keep a strict dress code, later called "The Disney Look," which forbade facial hair, hair falling over the collar for men, no unnatural hair dyes, simple, non-dangling earrings for women, and neutral makeup and nail polish. This look still is maintained today, although mustaches were soon allowed and, not too many years ago, simple, full, trimmed beards were allowed too. Plus, you have to keep a friendly, positive performance on stage.

But the worst of the casting meant you had to keep a look. Attractions (the rides) at Adventureland and Frontierland were entirely run by men, while most Fantasyland attractions and guest relations (the plaid) were women. Cast members were also slim and good looking. One cast member, the first manager of Adventureland and Frontierland, thought Walt didn't like him because he said "Walt doesn't like fat guys." There are rumors, that I have not personally found confirmation for, that the women's costumes only went up to a certain size, meaning if you couldn't fit in it, you couldn't work that job. But the rumor, if not explicitly true, is at least illuminating to the type of "casting" discrimination that was applied to the employees.

Non-white people, black people especially, were not seen much around the park as cast members. They often would hold custodial or restaurant jobs, or maybe as musicians, but most likely the jobs were backstage at the employee eateries or buildings. Like the film studio, Disneyland wasn't unduly discriminatory, but they certainly weren't progressive by any imagination. Walt usually couched his bias in a belief that if you could do the job well, it was yours. But those jobs more often than not went to white men. When the civil rights group the Congress of Racial Equality talked with Disneyland officials in 1963 to hire more black people, they were told the Disney brass would consider their request, but not necessarily act on that request. The prevailing thought was that Disneyland needed to maintain a sense of illusion, and having a black person as a 1800s train conductor or river boat captain wouldn't be believable.

All that to say, there was a time when Disneyland did discriminate who they let into their park, but it's not who you think. They didn't allow men in who sported long hair. After about eight years, they began to relax that policy somewhat. However, in 1970, a group of Yippies (an anti-war, anti-capitalist group that did stunts for political messaging) took over Tom Sawyer Island. They took seized the fort and replaced the American flag with the Yippie flag, all to protest the Vietnam War. After that stunt, the long hair regulations came back for a little while.

But I want to concluded by highlighting two employees who were not white. Ernie McLean, a black man, is considered to be one of the last Disneyland hires by Walt Disney himself. After auditioning as a guitarist, he was called by Walt to sub in for a banjo player. He then stuck around for over 30 years playing jazz guitar in New Orleans Square. Oscar Martinez started working in Disneyland in 1956 as a busboy, then cook, at a Fantasyland restaurant. He then moved to Carnation Cafe in 1967, where he stayed and eventually became the head chef until his retirement in 2017, making him the longest tenured Disneyland employee ever with 61 years.

Sources: "Walt Disney" by Neal Gabler; "MouseTales" by David Koenig; being a cast member for a handful of years.

Disneyland's segregation in the 50's and 60's can be thought of as by implicit design and not a written policy. Historian and UCLA professor Eric Avila maintains that the only black people you would find in the park would be those performing at various exhibits such as the Aunt Jemima House. Walt Disney was certainly not against using black performers with Song of the South (1946) starring James Baskett, although as the premiere was in Atlanta he could not attend the screening. For guests Disneyland's suburban location and main mode of access being a car and not public transit effectively prevented black people from urban areas from visiting the park.

Because of the factors surrounding the park there was no need for Disney to implement any kind of explicit segregation policy. There are some secondary factors like gate fees which further isolated the black population but historian Susan Session Rugh of BYU concludes that the location and accessibility of the park was the reason that Disneyland had what was effectively a segregated park.

In terms of whether this was explicitly deliberate the answer would appear to be yes. Walt Disney chose an inland location because of the dangers that racial mixing at public beaches caused. He had visited Coney Island Park in Cincinnati before opening Disneyland which used its private security and having separate "colored" days to keep it's park segregated. This was to the appearance of the park being safe to it's white visitors. Even on those colored days the park would close the pool and restaurants for fear of their regular patrons being afraid that these areas were sonehow contaminated.

However, it does appear that Disney's real motivation was to provide a clean, safe park to his guests and not out of some racist agenda. At the time that meant keeping perceived troublemakers (which included teenagers) out of the park and the for a lot of his white guests that means limiting black people.

I cannot definitively say whether there were any protests or complaints from those in favor of integration. From what I have read it does not appear there was anything major because, in the end, Disneyland was open to all but simply not made easily accessible for those of a lower socioeconomic class.

My information comes from Victoria Walcott's "Race, Riots, and Rollercoasters" published by University of Pennsylvania Press (2012).

As other users have pointed out, Disneyland was not formally segregated, but I would argue it was certainly not built for black bodies. Let’s take a tour of 1950s Disneyland ...

The first thing guests saw when they entered the park was Main Street USA, a quaint depiction of a turn-of-the-century town based on Walt’s favorite place (and where he grew up), Marceline, Missouri. But Main Street wasn’t advertised as a mere replica of Walt’s hometown. Instead, it has always been promoted as the American ideal. Disney himself stated that “Main Street is everyone’s hometown ... the heart line of America.” But black guests at Disneyland wouldn’t see their hometown. They saw a street from an overtly white town, run by mostly white cast members.

If black guests wanted to see black cast members, they could go to Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House, a restaurant in Frontierland modeled after a southern plantation, which featured an African American cast member playing the part of Aunt Jemima herself. If black guests wanted to see people of color in rides or shows, they would have to settle for the Jungle Cruise, where some of the scenes featured “native savages” attacking the boats. So technically you could find some black representation in the park, but there was clearly an erasure of blackness from the part of the park that was supposed to represent the ideal and perfect America.

This erasure of blackness continued to the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction. This show opened in 1966 and featured an animatronic Abraham Lincoln who gave a patriotic speech compiled of actual Lincoln quotes. In the original script, there was no mention of slavery or the Civil War. And yet in his famous opening day speech, Walt said “Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America.” But Disneyland avoided the hard facts in favor of a whitewashed park experience that seemed to specifically avoid racial tensions. In aiming to avoid racial tensions, the park appealed to the sensibilities of his middle class post-war audience, which Avila argues made the park a safe haven for white people to escape from growing post-war racial tensions. Thus, Disneyland ultimately was giving its middle class audience what it wanted. The park subtly mirrored larger social patterns of the post-war U.S. Disneyland helped to construct an idealized America, both by erasing blackness and by playing up a whitewashed public memory.

Like u/Dustin_Breadcrumbs said, Walt didn’t say anything overtly racist (at least on record). But he did embed subtle racism in Disneyland itself.

Sources: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Film Noir, Disneyland, and the Cold War (Sub)Urban Imaginary by Eric Avila, Walt Disney by Neal Gabler