Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each "race" were equal, ...
In 1953, Earl Warren became the 14th Chief Justice of the United States, and the Warren Court started a liberal Constitutional Revolution which outlawed racial segregation and "Separate but equal" throughout the United States in a series of landmark rulings.
The NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall (who became the first black Supreme Court Justice in 1967), was successful in challenging the constitutional viability of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The Warren Court voted to overturn sixty years of law that had developed under Plessy.
In the late 19th century, many states of the former Confederacy adopted laws, collectively known as Jim Crow laws, that mandated separation of whites and African Americans. The Florida Constitution of 1885 and that of West Virginia mandated separate educational systems. In Texas, laws required separate water fountains, restrooms, and waiting rooms in railroad stations. In Georgia, restaurants and taverns could not serve white and "colored" patrons in the same room; separate parks for each "race" were required, as were separate cemeteries. These are just examples from a large number of similar laws.
One example of this policy was the second Morrill Act ( Morrill Act of 1890 ). Before the end of the war, the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (Morrill Act of 1862) had provided federal funding for higher education by each state with the details left to the state legislatures . The 1890 Act implicitly accepted the legal concept ...
Declaration of Independence refers to secession from the British empire as a process by which groups of people take up "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.".
The members of the United States Supreme Court, 1896-97. Under Chief Justice Melville Fuller, the Court established the separate-but-equal rule. Courtesy of Supreme Court of the United States
In the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially separate facilities, if equal, did not violate the Constitution. Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination.
Ferguson. In 1890 a new Louisiana law required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races.”. Outraged, the black community in New Orleans decided to test the rule. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy agreed to be arrested for refusing to move from a seat reserved for whites.
African Americans turned to the courts to help protect their constitutional rights. But the courts challenged earlier civil rights legislation and handed down a series of decisions that permitted states to segregate people of color. In the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S.
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy agreed to be arrested for refusing to move from a seat reserved for whites. Judge John H. Ferguson upheld the law, and the case of Plessy v. Ferguson slowly moved up to the Supreme Court.