Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was a Supreme Court decision that upheld the principle of "separate but equal" in regard to racial segregation. The Court's decision said that separate, segregated public facilities were acceptable as long as the facilities offered were equal in quality.

In the decades after the Civil War, states in the South began to pass laws that sought to keep white and black society separate. In the 1880s, a number of state legislatures began to pass laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for passengers who were black. At the heart of the case that became Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1890 law passed in Louisiana in 1890 that required railroads to provide "separate railway carriages for the white and colored races.”

In 1892, Homer Plessy, who was 1/8 black, bought a first class train railroad ticket, took a seat in the whites only section, and then informed the conductor that he was part black. He was removed from the train and jailed. He argued for his civil rights before Judge John Howard Ferguson and was found guilty. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court which at that time upheld the idea of "separate but equal" facilities.

Several decades later, the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision was overturned. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1954, extended civil liberties to all Americans in regard to access to education. The "separate but equal" principle of Plessy v. Ferguson had been applied to education as it had been to transportation. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education, that standard was challenged and defeated. Segregation was shown to create inequality, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled segregation to be unconstitutional.

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