USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -The Court’s “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson on that date upheld state-imposed Jim Crow laws. It became the legal basis for racial segregation in the United States for the next fifty years. Read more about it!

Detailed explanation-2: -Ferguson ruled that separate-but-equal facilities were constitutional. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the principle of racial segregation over the next half-century. The ruling provided legal justification for segregation on trains and buses, and in public facilities such as hotels, theaters, and schools.

Detailed explanation-3: -He was solicited by the Comite des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), a group of New Orleans residents who sought to repeal the Act. They asked Plessy, who was technically black under Louisiana law, to sit in a “whites only” car of a Louisiana train.

Detailed explanation-4: -Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown rejected Plessy’s arguments that the act violated the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full and equal rights of citizenship to African Americans.

Detailed explanation-5: -Read the quotation from Justice John Marshall Harlan in his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent in 1896. “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” later adopted by the Supreme Court in the Brown v.