1896: Plessy v. Ferguson – in its ruling the Supreme Court said that racial segregation was legal if facilities for the races were "separate but equal."  In his dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan claimed that "the thin disguise of 'equal' accommodation...will not mislead anyone nor atone for the wrong this day done."

In this period, the Supreme Court also ruled unanimously that citizenship did not give people the privilege of voting, that much of the civil rights legislation passed by the Reconstruction Congress was unconstitutional, and that a Mississippi plan to take the vote away from black people was NOT unconstitutional.  When the Court in Cumming v. Georgia ruled in 1899 that a white high school did not have to be closed because a school district did not have the funds to maintain a school for African Americans, the myth of "separate but equal" was fully exposed.