Separate but equal | Definition, History, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, & Facts (2024)

separate but equal, the legal doctrine that once allowed for racial segregation in the United States. The doctrine held that so long as segregation laws affected white and Black people equally, those laws did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from “deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In practice, “separate but equal” was a sham; the treatment and facilities accorded to Black citizens ranged in quality from inferior to barbaric. The doctrine was effectively overturned by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), but its legacy is arguably still observable in the continued social and economic inequalities between white and Black Americans.

The phrase separate but equal itself comes from the Separate Car Act of 1890 (though the wording in the actual law was “equal but separate”). The Louisiana law effectively required all railroads operating in the state to provide separate cars for Black and white passengers. A mixed-race man named Homer Plessy challenged the law by sitting in a seat reserved for white passengers, for which he was arrested. Plessy and his legal team hoped that the Separate Car Act would be declared unconstitutional if his case, Plessy v. Ferguson, reached the Supreme Court. However, the strategy backfired: the Court accepted the case but upheld the act, settling the legality of racial segregation for generations.

Using “separate but equal” as constitutional cover, state and local governments in the South continued to pass laws —collectively referred to as “Jim Crow”—that theoretically treated white and Black Americans equally but actually enforced a racial caste system in which Black people occupied the lowest rank. White and Black students were forbidden from attending the other group’s schools, for example, but white students’ schools were given far more resources. Black and white people were prohibited from sitting in each other’s sections in theatres, but the white section was always in the front. And Black people were ostensibly allowed to vote, just as white people were, but only if they could afford to pay poll taxes and pass literacy or comprehension tests (which were not applied to illiterate whites), among other obstacles.

Late in the Jim Crow era, some civil rights activists were able to use segregationists’ bad faith to their advantage. In 1946, a Black student named Heman Marion Sweatt applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School, knowing that there was no equivalent institution for Black students in the state. Upon being refused admission because he was Black, Sweatt sued the school. The state then quickly created a separate law school for Blacks, but the Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) that, because the new institution could not possibly provide a legal education equal to that which Sweatt had been denied, “the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that [Sweatt] be admitted to the University of Texas Law School.”

The date on which the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Sweatt v. Painter—June 5, 1950—was a seminal one for racial integration. On the same day, the Court also ruled in another case, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, that the University of Oklahoma’s requirement that a Black graduate student sit in a row of classroom seats designated for Black students and at separate “Black” tables in the school’s library and cafeteria did not amount to a “separate but equal” accommodation. Taken together, the two cases effectively ended legal segregation in graduate and professional education.

The artifice of “separate but equal” collapsed in 1954 with the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which initiated the racial integration of the country’s public schools. In its ruling, the Court rejected Plessy v. Ferguson entirely by considering “the effect of segregation itself on public education” rather than only the question of whether equal resources were provided. For instance, the justices considered whether the self-esteem of Black children was harmed by forcing them to attend separate schools. Having applied such a perspective to the issue, Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous Court, declared that, “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Although the Court’s ruling in Brown applied only to public schools, its logic was clearly applicable to other public facilities. In subsequent years, civil rights lawyers cited Brown as a legal precedent for desegregating other public spaces. The decision also catalyzed the American civil rights movement, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial segregation in places of public accommodation involved in interstate commerce, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, among other provisions, suspended literacy tests.

Notwithstanding these advances, many proponents of civil rights have argued that a more subtle or surreptitious form of the “separate but equal” doctrine remains in effect today. Racial inequalities, for example, demonstrably continue to exist in American school systems, primarily due to racially concentrated residential patterns and the great disparity in funding between schools in different districts. How to remedy this and other imbalances is a contentious issue that has yet to be resolved.