Plessy v. Ferguson

The Court upheld state-mandated racial segregation under the separate but equal doctrine.

Overview

Homer Plessy, seven-eighths white, was arrested for sitting in a whites-only railcar under Louisiana law in a deliberate test case. Justice Brown, for a 7-1 majority, held that equal but separate accommodations did not violate equal protection, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment aimed to enforce legal rather than social equality, and that enforced separation stamped a badge of inferiority only if Black Americans chose to view it that way. Justice Harlan's lone dissent predicted the doctrine would prove as pernicious as Dred Scott. Plessy legitimized Jim Crow segregation for six decades until Brown repudiated it in 1954.