Plessy v. Ferguson

US Supreme Court decision of 1896 that upheld the legality of racial segregation with the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ public facilities. This standard for segregation legitimized the widespread Jim Crow laws in the South and remained in force until 1954, when it was finally overturned by the Brown v. Board of Education case.

Homer Plessy brought this case to the Supreme Court to test Louisiana segregation laws after he was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only train car. He argued that such discrimination was prohibited by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which granted equal protection under the law. The court ruled 8 to 1 against Plessy, holding that the Thirteenth Amendment only prohibited slavery and that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed only political but not social rights.

The majority opinion of the court, written by Henry Billings Brown, argued that the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine did not imply the inferiority of blacks. Public facilities for blacks, however, were almost always inferior to those for whites.