Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
Landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for people of color were equal in quality to those of white people, a doctrine that came to be known as “separate but equal”
The decision legitimized the many state "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877.
Such legally enforced segregation in the South lasted into the 1960s.
Generally considered the most controversial Supreme Court decision in American History, it played virtually no part in Roosevelt's political career.
Progressives were interested in the conditions of the working class and paid little to no attention to race relations. In 1912 Rosevelt subscribed to the “Lilly White” philosophy and prevented blacks from participating in his Progressive Party run for the presidency.
This photograph was taken by Mathew Brady and was created from a composite of four separate photographs he had previously taken of the Supreme Court Justices. The background is a painting of the courtroom done by Carl Bersch.