In short
On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 that racial segregation was constitutional as long as facilities were theoretically equal. The decision gave legal cover to Jim Crow laws across the South for nearly 60 years until Brown v. Board of Education dismantled it in 1954.
How it unfolded.
The five-minute version
What actually happened.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877.
Captured in time.
Captured before it changed
The web as it looked, the day it happened.
Wayback Machine snapshots of the pages people actually loaded that day. Click any card to open the archive at full size.
Sources & citations.
Sources
Where this came from.
Every claim on this page traces to a public, license-clean source. We don't asterisk well.
Wikipedia
1 source- 1.Plessy v. Ferguson
en.wikipedia.org