Plessy v. Ferguson
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case in which, on May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court, by an eight-to-one majority, advanced the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Decided nearly 30 years after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which had granted full and equal citizenship rights to African Americans, the Plessy case was the first major inquiry into the meaning of the amendment's equal-protection clause. In upholding a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars, the court reasoned that equal protection is not violated as long as reasonably equal accommodations are provided to each racial group. Despite a series of civil rights advances in subsequent years, the ruling served as a controlling judicial precedent until its reversal in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).
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