How did the Plessy v. Ferguson court case change the meanings and boundaries of the United States citizenship?

Answer 1

Plessy vs. Ferguson is best known as "Separate but Equal"

Plessy was in a place where he wasn't just black but he wasn't white either. He lived in Louisana and was also a Creole, but in the eyes of the law and people he was black. Anyone who was mixed, even if it was a tiny bit of black heritage, they were still considered black (I remember reading a book where these brothers, looked white, but were considered black, because their grandmother was black).

Plessy was arrested when he sat in the white section of a train and refused to move (sound familiar, Rosa Parks?). His case went all the way up to the Supreme Level and even through it was rejected it was still a landmark case for what came after and years after slowly changing the course of history for African Americans.

Some background information. For the most part in the South, African Americans and whites mingled with eachother. It's how things had always been. Once slavery was abolished, African Americans held hope that things would be better for them, but all that changed in the 1880s when state legislatures passed a law for separate cars for "colored" passagers.

By the end of the 1800's every state had their own set of segration laws. They were separate, but they weren't equal. The Plesssy vs. Ferguson Case, changed that. Everything was still separate, but now equal.

Plessy's Lawyers tried to say that the segregation violated his civil rights (14th amendment). The Supreme Court said that the 14th Amendement does not apply to "social rights" such as sitting where you want to, but only to political and civil rights (such as voting or serving jury duty).

Jim Crow laws existed before this, but after the ruling, it helped keep them alive for several decades. It wouldn't be until Brown vs. Board of Education that really started to push the civil rights movement and that wasn't until the 1950's.