In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, a man who was 1/8 black sat in the white section of a train. He refused to move, and he was arrested. He appealed and got the court to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that "equal but separate accommodations" were allowed. The judge said the law that Plessy was challenging was valid and did not imply that either race was inferior to the other.
The one dissenting judge brought up the ignored intent of the law to keep colored people out of white people's space, which is not equality at all. I believe this was a horrible court decision because they were just justifying their own racism while brushing aside the huge issue of their own racist tradition. The judge rejected that "social prejudices may be overcome by legislation," and that "if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane." This was just an excuse for being racist. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, which made many people upset, but definitely was a win for colored people, who were no longer inferior as slaves. They weren't socially accepted as whites, of course, because people are stubborn and believe what they want, but this would be fixed in time. In this case, the justices did not live up to their titles in the least.
Luckily, this decision was later overturned in Brown v. Board of Education.
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