Letter of the Law: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a citizen of mixed descent, was convicted for refusing to move from his seat in the "Whites Only" car of an East Louisiana Railway train. Ruling that separate but equal facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict of John Ferguson, the criminal district court judge of Orleans. This led to decades of segregation that denied African Americans their rights. The decision was eventually overturned in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.This list contains words from the majority opinion written by Henry Brown. Read the full text here.