Racism, Jim Crow and the Supreme Court

Segregation¹⁰

In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation based on race was legal and the Jim Crow era began. However, one justice dissented from the majority opinion. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone voice would be an eloquent defense of the idea of equality before the law. His dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson was one of many that gave him the name, ‘the great dissenter’. But this would be his greatest dissent of…