The "separate-but-equal" doctrine is established by the…

The "separate-but-equal" doctrine is established by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson, a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upholds the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities are equal in quality.

The decision legitimizes the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877).

The decision involves a case that originated in 1892 when Homer Plessy, an "octoroon" (person of seven-eighths white and one-eighth black ancestry) resident of New Orleans, deliberately violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which requires "equal, but separate" train car accommodations for white and non-white passengers.

Upon being charged, Plessy's lawyers had defended him by arguing that the law was unconstitutional.

He lost at trial, and his conviction was affirmed on his appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Plessy then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case.

In May 1896, the Supreme Court issues a 7–1 decision against Plessy ruling that the Louisiana law does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment establishes the legal equality of white and black Americans, it does not and cannot require the elimination of all social or other "distinctions based upon color".

The Court rejects Plessy's lawyers' arguments that the Louisiana law inherently implies that black people are inferior, and gives great deference to American state legislatures' inherent power to make laws regulating health, safety, and morals—the "police power"—and to determine the reasonableness of the laws they pass.

Justice John Marshall Harlan is the lone dissenter from the Court's decision, writing that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens", and so the law's distinguishing of passengers' races should have been found unconstitutional.

Plessy is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history.

Despite its infamy, the decision itself will never be explicitly overruled.

However, a series of subsequent decisions beginning with the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education—which holds that the "separate but equal" doctrine is unconstitutional in the context of public schools and educational facilities—will severely weaken Plessy to the point that it is today considered to have been de facto overruled.
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