Today in History: Plessy vs Fergusson

On this day (May Eighteen) in 1896 the Supreme Court established the standard of "separate but equal" in the case Plessy vs Fergusson. (Homer Plessy had been arrested for taking a seat in a “white’s only” railroad car in Louisiana.) The ruling permitted the establishment of the Jim Crow era in the south which institutionalized segregation of the races at every level of society. It wasn't overturned until 1954 in Brown vs Topeka Board of Education.