Plessy v. Ferguson
Issue
Plessy v. Ferguson set a precedent for all other cases in 1986 during the supreme court. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, this was breaking a Louisiana law. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Court ruled that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and14th Amendments. Restrictive legislation based on race continued following the Plessy decision, its reasoning not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.