Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was the landmark United States Supreme Court decision that constitutionally sanctioned state-mandated racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal." The case arose from Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which required railroads to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for white and "colored" passengers. Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth Black under Louisiana's racial classification, deliberately boarded a whites-only car in 1892 as part of a planned legal challenge organized by the Comité des Citoyens of New Orleans. Arrested before Judge John Howard Ferguson, Plessy argued that the statute violated the Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery) and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 7–1 majority, the Court rejected both claims.

Writing for the majority, Justice Henry Billings Brown held that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to enforce political and legal equality but not to abolish distinctions based on color or to enforce "social equality." The Court reasoned that segregation laws did not imply the inferiority of either race and that any badge of inferiority existed only because Black Americans chose to perceive it that way. So long as facilities were equal, the state could constitutionally separate the races. The lone dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan became one of the most celebrated in American jurisprudence; he declared that "our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens," presciently warning that the decision would prove as pernicious as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).

The decision furnished the constitutional foundation for the Jim Crow regime that governed the American South for nearly six decades, legitimizing segregation in schools, transportation, public accommodations, and voting practices. In practice, facilities for Black Americans were systematically inferior, exposing the fiction of the "equal" prong. The doctrine was steadily eroded in education cases such as Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), before being decisively overturned in the public-education context by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), in which Chief Justice Earl Warren held that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Subsequent rulings and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dismantled the remaining structures of de jure segregation. As of 2026, Plessy stands as a repudiated precedent and a cautionary symbol; Homer Plessy received a posthumous pardon from Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards in January 2022.

For the FSOT, Plessy v. Ferguson is a high-frequency topic spanning both the U.S. Government and U.S. History domains. Candidates should be able to pair it with Brown v. Board of Education as the canonical example of a Supreme Court reversal, identify the "separate but equal" doctrine, recognize Justice Harlan's "color-blind Constitution" dissent, and place the case within the trajectory from Reconstruction's collapse through the Civil Rights Movement. Typical question angles test the constitutional clause at issue (the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause), the doctrine the case established, and the later case that overturned it.