Highlights

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in favor of upholding Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890
Established the "separate but equal" doctrine as constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment
Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white, was arrested for sitting in a whites-only railroad car
Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the sole dissenting opinion, calling the decision a "badge of servitude"
The ruling was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, 58 years later

Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision handed down on May 18, 1896, which legally sanctioned racial segregation across public facilities throughout the nation. The case originated when Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man from Louisiana, deliberately challenged the state's Separate Car Act by sitting in a whites-only railway car. He was arrested, and his legal team argued that the law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Court's majority opinion, written by Justice Henry Billings Brown, held that separate facilities did not inherently imply inferiority and were therefore constitutionally permissible.

The decision had profound and far-reaching consequences, providing the legal foundation for Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation across the American South and beyond for nearly six decades. It entrenched systemic discrimination in education, transportation, housing, and public life. The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, famously wrote that the "Constitution is color-blind," anticipating the arguments that would eventually prevail in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, when the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the separate but equal doctrine in the context of public education.