The U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson was decided on May 18, 1896. This landmark case upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws under the “separate but equal” doctrine, allowing for segregated public facilities for African Americans and white Americans as long as the facilities were equal in quality. The case originated from an incident in 1892 when Homer Plessy, who was of mixed race, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in Louisiana in violation of state law. The Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in favor of the segregation laws with Justice Henry Billings Brown writing the majority opinion.
This decision was later overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which declared that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
