The only reason Plessy was ejected from the train car was because he was one-eighth Black. To reject his claim—to argue that legislating different treatment based not on the “color” of one’s skin but on their racial classification was valid—would be to admit that the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t worth the parchment it was written on. And the Supreme Court did just that. In a 7–1 decision the Court upheld the Louisiana law mandating segregated train cars.
