Separate Amenities Act, Act No 49 of 1953, formed part of the apartheid system of racial segregation in South Africa. The Act legalized the racial segregation of public premises, vehicles and services. Only public roads and streets were excluded from the Act. The Section 3b of the Act stated that, the facilities for different races did not need to be equal, while Section 3a, made it legal not only to supply segregated facilities, but also to completely exclude people, based on their race, from public premises, vehicles or services. In practice the best facilities were reserved for whites while those for other races were inferior.

Before the enactment of the Act in 1953, the courts in South Africa, applied common law, in the absence of any other law to challenges concerning race and use of amenities basing their decision on one of the presumption of equality between the different races in the country.

R v. Plaatjies 1910, prevented a municipality from separating races at a swimming stream. While in 1915, Williams and Adendorf v. Johannesburg Municipality, prevented trams in the city from being segregated. In 1934, Minister of Posts and Telegraph v. Rasool, held that the former could not a create greater right for one race versus another, in this case at a postal facility through segregation. And in 1950, an Indian taxi driver, challenged and won when his licence to drive white passengers was stripped from him, in Tayah v. Ermelo Local Transportation Board.

Segregation at railway stations was challenged several times in court. In R. v. Abduraham 1950, the court found in the favour of the defendant when it was established that by providing White European only signs, the railways had discriminated, in the application of a 1916 railways act, against non-whites for not providing an area where they could get away from White Europeans. When facilities were provided and found to be inferior to White Europeans, as was challenged in R. v. Lusa 1953, the courts found the railways could not provide unequal treatment.

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act would therefore be introduced and enacted in parliament to bring certainty to the right to have separate amenities protected by a law, giving those reserving areas for different races the legal right not to provide an alternative service or facility for other races.

The bill was brought to parliament in 1953, by C. R. Swart, Minister for Justice, with its main purpose to reduce contact between Whites and non-Whites in social settings. He was quoted in Hansard stating:

If a European has to sit next to a non-European at school, if on a railway station they are to use the same waiting rooms, if they are continually to travel together on the trains and sleep in the same hotels, it is evident that eventually we would have racial admixture, with the result that on the one hand one would no longer find a purely European population and on the other hand a non-European population.

— Hansard 1953 col. 1053