Source

Plessy v. Ferguson

Classification

primary

Type

government-document

Date

1896

Citation

1896

Rights

public-domain

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 ruling upholding Louisiana's law requiring separate railway cars for white and Black passengers, establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine that underwrote Jim Crow segregation until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Justice John Marshall Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slaveowner, wrote the lone dissent.