CHIP CLARKE:
Plessy v. Ferguson was a Supreme Court case in 1896 involving an African-American man named Homer Plessy. It took place in Louisiana, and Homer Plessy sat in a white-only railroad car. In Louisiana, this railroad car company, they had separate cars for whites blacks. So he sat in the white-only railroad car, refused to leave. The case ends up going through the lower courts, gets to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court decided that it did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So what they decided is separate but equal doctrine came to be. As long as you have equal facilities—and they were anything but equal in the South—as long as you had equal facilities it was OK to separate the races. 

It basically what it allowed was the southern states to do was what they were already doing with their Jim Crow laws. They make African Americans to be second-class citizens. 

STEVE SUITTS:
Jim Crow separated folks on the street cars, they separated folks in bathrooms. Black folks would not be allowed to use a spigot where water was flowing just to get a drink if it was used by white folks in any way. They just simply wanted to separate black people from all of white folks, and then assure that in Jim Crow laws that they were unable to influence society so that they could change any of this. 

CLIP CLARKE:
Some Jim Crow laws were passed during this time to disenfranchise African Americans. Disenfranchise means to deny African Americans the right to vote, to deny a certain group of people. And we associate it within our society to deny African Americans the right to vote. There were several different ways to disenfranchise. One of the laws was the poll tax. These former slaves just coming out of slavery did not have a lot of money, and they could not afford the fee in all of these different elections. Another was the White Primary. In the White Primaries, you had to be a white to vote in it, so African Americans were not even allowed to vote in the primary elections to even pick the candidate that they wanted. And then you had literacy tests which, again, it was illegal as slaves to learn how to read and write—to teach a slave to read and write. So the majority of African Americans could not pass these literacy tests because they could not read and write legibly. 

STEVE SUITTS:
What Jim Crow era did was establish a way, with the sanction of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which to indirectly infringe upon those rights with the blessings of the rest of the country and the U.S. Supreme Court... until Brown v. The Board.