race in this country.” But Harlan declared: in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.By the time the court decided Plessy the South was well on its way to creating a thoroughly segregated society. The Plessy ruling merely accelerated the process and provided it with legal sanction. Within a few years almost every institution or facility in the South was segregated. In addition to schools, streetcars, railroads, hotels, and restaurants, southern states segregated sports arenas, telephone booths, and elevators. In some states blacks and whites could not fish on the same lakes, play baseball together, or shoot pool at the same establishment.Most American blacks, and some whites, condemned the Plessy decision and its repercussions. Some of this opposition led to the creation in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting racial segregation. Most whites in the North ignored the plight of Southern blacks in the wake of Plessy, while most Southern whites used the decision to justify racial discrimination.Nearly 60 years passed before the Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , that the “separate but equal” doctrine had no place in public education. Two years later, in Gayle v. Browder , the Supreme Court struck down segregation in public transportation—the same kind of segregation upheld in Plessy. By then the South had built a social and legal system deeply rooted in racial...
