User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Alabama

Public toilets in Alabama, commonly called washrooms, are found at a rate of four per 100,000 people. Public toilets have been subject to racial segregation policies. They have also been used to combat disease. Oxford, Alabama passed a law requiring transgender people to use the public toilet that matched their sex only to change the law back to the way it was a week later.

Public toilets
washroom is one of the most commonly used words for public toilet in the United States.

A 2021 study found there were four public toilets per 100,000 people.

There was a push back against building public toilets in Jim Crow states during the period between 1865 and 1960, because it meant that local governments were not just required to build two toilets, one for men and one for women, but four toilets, one each for men and women who were white and who were colored. Racially segregated public toilets were very common in the 1960s.

The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was founded in 1909 to combat hookworm disease in the South. A survey was done of 11 southern states, which confirmed the presence of hookworm in 700 countries. A chief cause of spread of hookworm disease as open defecation in farmland. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission program helped install public toilets and promote their use as part of their efforts to reduce hookworm disease. This was coupled with offering free exams and health treatment for hookworm disease.

Because Prohibition saw an increase in the construction of public toilets to address the new found demand, many municipalities located outside the South built sex-segregated public toilets that were essentially the same construction inside, with the same number of stalls and layout for each. In the South, public toilet facilities tended to have four toilet sections that reinforced racial segregation, one for white women, one for white men, one for colored men and one for colored women.

Oxford, Alabama passed a law requiring transgender people to use the public toilet that matched their sex and not their gender identity. A week later, after seeing the protests in North Carolina in response to similar legislation, the town reversed their decision.