I just watched Lee Daniels' The Butler on Netflix. There is a scene in the movie that shows a water fountain that had a "colored" side and a "white" side. That got me thinking.
Which side would Indians (native American or East), Arabs, Asians, and any other non whites I am forgetting, drink from? Was segregation strictly a black and white thing or did it apply to all non whites?
I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I'm not too good with the reddit search engine. I did try though.
There's always more that can be said, but you may find this older answer to a similar question useful. Basically, a person of color would sit, eat, and go wherever they had the social capital with white people to go, sit, eat, etc.
In that answer, I reference a question about children of color in white schools and I use an analogy of an umbrella as a way to think about how white Americans collectively situated people of color:
... picture the Europeans who colonized North America carrying umbrellas with the word "whiteness" written on the side over their heads when they stepped on the shore. To be sure, they didn't think of themselves as white, nor did the concept of "whiteness" exist as it would later come to be, but it's a helpful way to get at the history you're asking about.
If a man was under the umbrella, he could own land. He had a vote and a say in how his community operated and where his taxes went. Women had fewer protections but could keep their children [generally speaking.] They had a role in the development of the new country and in some places, could own land and property. This isn't to say being under the umbrella meant sunshine and roses, but it did mean having access to power. Most importantly, though, the people holding the umbrellas determined who was allowed under it....
The idea of the umbrella also helps us understand the history of Italian and Irish immigrants as a group, who found themselves under the drippy edge of the umbrella - either forcefully kept from entering or choosing to stay out. Those with the power to determine who was entitled to the protections that whiteness in America provided weren't convinced that all Italian and Irish immigrants were entitled to those protections. (For more on the history of these two particular groups, I highly recommend this recent piece, "How Italians Became White" and Noel Ignatiev's book How the Irish Became White. Both get into the decisions made by the respective immigrant groups to do what it took to get under the umbrella.)
Which is to say, many people considered white today were, at one point, treated as non-white and people with Indigenous, African, or Asian ancestry may have been able to go, eat, or ride the bus in one context or city or not in another.