The Supreme Court Blesses "Separate but Equal" in Plessy v. Ferguson
Homer Plessy's staged arrest on a Louisiana train car becomes the legal foundation of Jim Crow for the next 58 years
Quick facts
- Location
- Louisiana, decided in Washington, D.C.
- Vote
- 7-1, with Justice Harlan dissenting
- Overturned by
- Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
What happened
In 1892 Homer Plessy, a New Orleans man classified as one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only railroad car to test Louisiana's 1890 Separate Car Act. He was arrested, and his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 7-1 on May 18, 1896, that racially separate public facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause so long as the facilities were "equal." The Court's opinion held that laws requiring separation of the races did not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race, language the National Archives records directly from the milestone document. Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent argued the Constitution was "color-blind," but the majority's ruling stood as binding precedent.
Why it matters
Plessy gave a constitutional green light to segregation across every part of Southern life: schools, transit, restaurants, cemeteries. Southern legislatures used it to build the full Jim Crow legal code, and the ruling stood until Brown v. Board of Education overturned it in 1954.
How we know
The National Archives holds the Supreme Court's original 1896 opinion as a milestone document; its text lays out the "separate but equal" doctrine in the majority's own words.
Sources
- National Park Service. Reconstruction and Repression, 1865-1900 · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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