Thurgood Marshall

century often featured white actors who wore black-face makeup and danced to the refrain, “Jump, Jim Crow!” The term Jim Crow , used as a patronizing name for black people, was also applied to post–Civil War segregation laws.) Charged with violating a state law that required racial segregation in public facilities, Plessy was convicted by a Louisiana judge named John Ferguson. When Plessy’s lawyer appealed the conviction before the United States Supreme Court, he argued that enforced separation of the two races violated the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees all citizens “the equal protection of the laws.” The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation legally ended slavery in the South. The amendment was designed to guarantee newly freed blacks the same legal rights and privileges as whites. The Supreme Court, in its 1896 Plessy decision, upheld the Louisiana segregation law, ruling that separate but “equal” facilities satisfied the amendment’s “equal protection” guarantee. Although the court’s decision technically applied only to the Louisiana law, it established a precedent. When the Supreme Court establishes a precedent, the nation’s lower courts are bound to follow it unless it is overturned by the Supreme Court itself. Because consistency is very important to a legal system, precedents are seldom overturned. Plessy opened the gates for a flood of new Jim Crow laws—statutes that required racial separation in both private residential areas and public facilities. By 1900, blacks in many states were restricted to certain specified drinking fountains, railroad cars, movie theater sections, hospitals, and schools. Despite the Plessy ruling, few state or local governments enforced the equality of the institutions and services available to blacks. Guided by the separate-but-equal precedent, county and state courts routinely dismissed antisegregation lawsuits. Black students could legally be compelled to attend

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