The Supreme Court's decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, handed down in 1896, was in favor of the state of Louisiana, which had enacted a law requiring racial segregation on trains. The Court ruled that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law. They established the "separate but equal" doctrine, which allowed for segregation as long as the segregated facilities were of equal quality. This decision upheld racial segregation in public facilities for several decades until it was later overturned by the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
