Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Plessy was a man who was 1/8 black and decided to sit in the white section of a train. When asked to hand his seat over to a white passenger, he refused and got arrested. Ferguson, the state judge of Louisiana, charged him to be imprison. This decision was agreed by the Supreme Court.

In this court case, Justice Harlan kept his dissent strictly to what he thought Louisiana meant. He believed that the purpose of this law was for the whites and the blacks to "keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches." I believe the purpose of "separate but equal" was just an excuse for dissenters to pass federal opinion by putting in equal when in fact being separate "coaches" cannot merely mean equal when the quality of the each separate coach so blatantly unequal. Harlan even claims that the purpose was to give equal accommodation, but with so much evidence all over the nation that black schools and transits are in poorer condition, the claim is unreliable.

Although Justice John Harlan wanted to clarify that the case was not simply a matter of separating two races apart on a train, the majority opinion thought otherwise. This case helped bring tension to this issue of "separate but equal" leading up to the Brown v Board of Education in Topeka Kansas case.