Plessy V Ferguson Essay

545 Words2 Pages

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, is a landmark in United States Supreme Court’s decision in the United States, of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses, under the doctrine of separate but equal. The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1, with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Separate but equal remained a standard doctrine in U.S. law until its rejection in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. Plessy v. Ferguson was the first major inquiry into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, which prohibits states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions. Although the majority opinion did not contain the phrase separate but equal, it gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate and supposedly equal public facilities and services for African Americans and whites. It served as a controlling judicial precedent until it was overturned by the ...

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