Cases & Legislation

"Louisiana enacted the Separate Car Act which required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In 1892 Homer Plessy – who was seven-eighths Caucasian – agreed to participate in a test to challenge the Act. He was solicited by the Comite des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) a group of New Orleans residents who sought to repeal the Act. They asked Plessy who was technically black under Louisiana law to sit in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train."

"This case was the consolidation of cases arising in Kansas South Carolina Virginia Delaware and Washington D.C. relating to the segregation of public schools on the basis of race. In each of the cases African American students had been denied admittance to certain public schools based on laws allowing public education to be segregated by race. They argued that such segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs were denied relief in the lower courts based on Plessy v. Ferguson which held that racially segregated public facilities were legal so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.