Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The case arose when Homer Plessy, a man of mixed racial ancestry, was arrested for sitting in a whites-only railway car in Louisiana in violation of the Separate Car Act of 1890. The Court ruled 7-1 that racially segregated public accommodations did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, provided the separate facilities were substantially equal. The decision provided the primary constitutional justification for state-mandated racial segregation in the United States for nearly six decades, until it was explicitly overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Homer Adolph Plessy was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black by ancestry under Louisiana's racial classification laws. On 7 June 1892, he boarded the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans and seated himself in a car designated for white passengers. Upon refusing to move to the colored car, he was arrested and charged under the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890. The case was a deliberate test of the law organized by the Comite des Citoyens (Citizens' Committee), a New Orleans civil rights organization. Plessy argued that the act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The case reached the Supreme Court after Louisiana judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against Plessy at the district level. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause was not intended to abolish social distinctions based on race, and that enforced separation of races did not imply inferiority of either group. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a solitary dissent, arguing that the Constitution is “color-blind” and that the majority's reasoning was inconsistent with the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Plessy decision established “separate but equal” as the operative constitutional standard for evaluating racially discriminatory state laws. Under this framework, states throughout the South enacted extensive segregation statutes governing schools, transportation, restaurants, restrooms, and other public facilities. Critics have argued that in practice, separate facilities were rarely equal, and that the doctrine served primarily to institutionalize racial subordination. Defenders of the decision at the time and since have argued it correctly interpreted the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment in its historical context, though this originalist reading is itself disputed. The legal reasoning of Plessy was substantially rejected by the Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the decision is now widely regarded as one of the most consequential constitutional errors in American legal history. Questions about the proper method of constitutional interpretation raised by the case remain active in legal scholarship. See Legal Consensus.

For a detailed account of the origins of the case, its progression through the courts, and its aftermath, see Plessy v. Ferguson - History.

There is broad historical and legal scholarly consensus that Plessy v. Ferguson was wrongly decided and that the “separate but equal” doctrine was constitutionally indefensible. See Plessy v. Ferguson - Legal Consensus. Debate continues among legal scholars regarding the appropriate interpretive methodology - original intent, original public meaning, or living constitutionalism - that best explains both why Plessy was wrong and why Brown was right. These questions are addressed in Plessy v. Ferguson - Debate.

• Plessy as constitutional error under original meaning - Some originalist scholars argue that the majority opinion misread the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that Brown reached the correct result by better originalist reasoning. See Viewpoint: Plessy as Originalist Error-viewpoint.
• Brown as correction requiring non-originalist reasoning - Some legal theorists argue that overturning Plessy required departing from strict original-meaning analysis, and that this illustrates the necessity of living constitutionalism. See Viewpoint: Living Constitution and Brown-viewpoint.
• Harlan's dissent as the correct reading - A view held by many legal historians holds that Justice Harlan's color-blind constitutionalism was the proper interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment from the outset, and that the majority deviated from the text's plain guarantees. See Viewpoint: Harlan's Dissent-viewpoint.
• Plessy in the context of judicial restraint - Some legal commentators have examined the case as an instance of the Court deferring to legislative judgments about social organization, raising questions about the proper scope of judicial review. See Viewpoint: Judicial Restraint and Plessy-viewpoint.

• Plessy v. Ferguson - History
• Plessy v. Ferguson - Debate
• Plessy v. Ferguson - Legal Consensus
• Brown v. Board of Education
• Fourteenth Amendment
• Separate But Equal
• United States - History
• Reconstruction Amendments
• Jim Crow Laws

1. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Available at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/
2. Louisiana Separate Car Act, Acts of Louisiana, 1890, No. 111.
3. Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1987).
4. Brook Thomas, ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997).
5. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
6. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004).
7. Kermit L. Hall and Peter Karsten, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009).