a 1896 Supreme Court case which upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car of a passenger train, breaking a Louisiana law. The Court rejected Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, ruling that the state law that implies a legal distinction between whites and blacks did not conflict with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
