Plessy v Ferguson

Plessy v Ferguson, decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1896, upheld a Louisiana law requiring racially separate railway carriages against a challenge that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Homer Plessy, who was one eighth Black under Louisiana law, deliberately sat in a whites-only railway car as part of a planned test case organized by a New Orleans civil rights committee, was arrested, and challenged his conviction. In a 7 to 1 opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown, the Court held that laws requiring separate facilities for Black and white citizens did not violate the Constitution so long as the facilities were equal, the origin of what came to be called the separate but equal doctrine; Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote alone in dissent that the Constitution is color blind and that the decision would prove as pernicious as the Court's earlier Dred Scott ruling. Separate but equal provided the constitutional foundation for legally enforced racial segregation across the American South for the following fifty eight years. The Supreme Court unanimously overruled Plessy in Brown v Board of Education (1954), holding that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, and Plessy is treated in American constitutional law today as a clear historical wrong rather than as a live legal question of any kind; this entry states that record plainly, not as one side of a live debate.