Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 - Supreme Court 1896

Justice HARLAN: "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

In 1896, the Supreme Court found that "separate schools for white and colored children" did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

The State has sought to fulfill that obligation by furnishing equal facilities in separate schools, a method the validity of which has been sustained by our decisions.

Thus, detrimental racial classifications by government always violate the Constitution, for the simple reason that, so far as the Constitution is concerned, people of different races are always similarly situated.

The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race,... is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution

—upheld a Louisiana statute that required all railway companies to provide equal but separate accommodations for the "white and colored races."

“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff 's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Justice Harlan was a lone dissenter from the Court' s ruling upholding separate but equal mistreatment based on race.

—was a test case on the part of a civil rights organization in New Orleans brought to attack the constitutionality of the Jim Crow laws then spreading throughout the South.

D. Mitchell, C. Marshall, and Frederick M. Wirt, Culture and Education Policy in the American States (New York: Falmer), Ch. 4. 23.

[CITATION] Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1