The legitimacy of laws requiring segregation of blacks was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. The Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute that required railroad companies to provide "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black passengers, and prohibited whites and blacks from using railroad cars that were not assigned to their race.[17]
Plessy thus allowed segregation, which became standard throughout the southern United States, and represented the institutionalization of the Jim Crow period. Everyone was supposed to receive the same public services (schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.), but with separate facilities for each race. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African-Americans were almost always of lower quality than those reserved for whites.

The high court rulings led to a profusion of Jim Crow laws. By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies — one black, the other white. This artificial structure was maintained by denying the franchise to blacks through the use of devices such as grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests. It was further strengthened by the creation of separate facilities in every part of society, including schools, restaurants, streetcars, health-care institutions, and cemeteries.

The first major blow against the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was struck in 1954 by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. In the following decade the system slowly crumbled under the onslaught of the civil rights movement. The legal structure of segregation was finally ended by the civil rights legislation of 1964–68.

Ronald L. Lewis