"Separate but equal" was a phrase used by attorneys for the NAACP during the litigation of Brown v. Board of Education. The actual phrase used in Plessy v. Ferguson was "equal but separate." The phrase summarized a custom enacted into law throughout the U.S. Southern states during the period of segregation, in which African-Americans and European-Americans would receive the same services (schools, hospitals, water fountains, bathrooms, etc.), but that there would be distinct facilities for each race. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African-Americans were frequently of lower quality than those reserved for whites; for example, many African-American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools.

The legitimacy of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a key focus of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the state level; the companion case of Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 outlawed such practices at the Federal level in the District of Columbia.

It was also used in apartheid South Africa to claim services for whites were as good as services for blacks.

See also

• Segregation
• Discrimination
• Jim Crow laws
• Baseball color line
• Ethnopluralism
• Second-class citizen

African-American history | Racism | History of racial segregation in the United States

Separate but equal | Separate but equal