Separate but equal

Common card · No. 206284

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 nominally guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate." The doctrine was confirmed in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Although segregation laws existed before that case, the decision emboldened segregation states during the Jim Crow era, which had commenced...

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