Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson

After Reconstruction ended, Southern states built a system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement known as Jim Crow. Laws separated Black and white Americans in railway cars, schools, hospitals, parks and cemeteries, and new state constitutions used poll taxes, literacy tests and 'grandfather clauses' to remove Black voters. In 1892 Homer Plessy, a man of mixed ancestry, deliberately sat in a whites-only railway car in Louisiana to test a segregation law. In Plessy v.

Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court ruled 7–1 that segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment so long as facilities were 'separate but equal'. In practice, facilities for Black Americans were almost always worse, and segregation was backed by economic pressure and racial terror, including lynching. Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent declared that the Constitution is colour-blind. The ruling gave legal cover to segregation for nearly six decades and became the main target of later civil rights lawyers.