By looking at the 1849 poem, one reason that London's drinking water was polluted was because the Thames River was polluted. The river was polluted because it was filled with sewer, factory waste, and sink waste. Officials were paid off to ignore all of the pollution being dumped into the Thames River.
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal"
