What happened in the plessy vs ferguson
In the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court of the United States made a landmark decision on May 18, 1896. The case originated from Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which mandated separate railway cars for blacks and whites. Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man who identified as black, purposely violated this law by sitting in a "whites only" railroad car.
Plessy was arrested and taken to court, where his lawyers argued that his rights under the 13th and 14th Amendments were violated. They contended that segregation perpetuated racial inequality and denied African Americans equal protection under the law.
However, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation based on the "separate but equal" doctrine. They reasoned that as long as the separate facilities for different races were equal in quality, there was no infringement of constitutional rights. This decision essentially sanctioned racial segregation and the "Jim Crow" laws that followed, creating separate public facilities for blacks and whites across the United States.
The Plessy v. Ferguson decision remained in effect until the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, when the Supreme Court declared that the "separate but equal" doctrine had no place in public education and that segregation itself was unconstitutional.