What Supreme Court case established "separate but equal"?

The case that established the doctrine of "separate but equal" is Plessy v. Ferguson. Decided in 1896, this landmark Supreme Court ruling upheld state laws that mandated racial segregation in public facilities, under the premise that as long as the separate facilities for the races were equal, segregation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling provided a legal justification for the widespread racial segregation that followed and effectively legitimized the Jim Crow laws in the southern United States for decades.

The context surrounding this case is critical. It stemmed from a challenge by Homer Plessy, who was partially African American and had been arrested for sitting in a whites-only railway car in Louisiana. The Supreme Court's ruling indicated that social and legal separation based on race was constitutionally permissible as long as the segregated facilities were purportedly equal, further entrenching systemic racism.

The other cases listed address different issues: Brown v. Board of Education overturned "separate but equal" in education, Loving v. Virginia dealt with interracial marriage, and Roe v. Wade focused on the right to privacy and reproductive rights. While they are all significant in their own right, they do not pertain to the creation of the "se