The Declaration of Independence promises that all men are created equal. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States extended that declaration to include Americans of all races. Despite these promises of equality, many Americans pushed for separate accommodations for black and white people. To reconcile the promises of Democracy with the desire for segregation, the 1896 Supreme Court endorsed a policy that made it legal to have separate accommodations for black people and white people as long as the accommodations were equal. The decision of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson gave the states permission to create many laws that segregated black people and white people. These laws became known as “Jim Crow” laws.
Jim Crow laws were most prevalent in the southern states. In the 1950s many organizations began filing lawsuits to prove that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. In the 1952 case Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court determined that, at least in the arena of education, separate was inherently unequal therefore unconstitutional.
