a black railroad passenger, Homer Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.Plessy, was arrested when he refused to vacate a "whites only" seat and move to one of the train's "black" cars.

Plessy's arrest led to a legal challenge to a Louisiana statute mandating "separate but equal" accommodations which reached the Supreme Court as Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court's ruling in that case struck down the Louisiana statute, citing the earlier decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) which declared that the framers of the Constitution had never contemplated treating blacks as the legal equals of whites.

The decision in the Plessy case angered not only blacks but also the railroad companies, which had supported Plessy's suit because they were unhappy with the expense of maintaining separate cars for blacks. Southern whites, however, were pleased: they had threatened secession in 1860 when it appeared that Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party, a successor to the moribund Whigs associated with opposition to Negro slavery, would be elected president; only the electoral compromise of that year which instead placed Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in the White House persuaded secession advocates to back down. As the years had passed, though, the pressure to end slavery had continued while an increasing number of states had passed laws similar to Louisiana's which, at least in theory, allowed blacks access to "separate, but equal" facilities aboard trains and in such public facilities as theaters, schools and libraries.

In practice, such facilities usually proved more separate than equal. But the very idea of blacks, even free blacks, of whom Louisiana in particular possessed a significant number, being entitled to privileges similar to those of whites infuriated many of the latter, and not only in the South. While by the time of Plessy's arrest and lawsuit tensions had not risen to the same point as in 1860, there was a growing so-called "Real America" movement dedicated to overturning such laws and kicking out of office legislators who had voted for them and judges who had ruled in their favor. The decision in Plessy took some of the steam out of the "Real Americans", who turned their attention primarily to opposing immigration, particularly from Asia and Eastern Europe.

Plessy did not lay to rest forever the issue of Negro equality. By 1910, every state but Mississippi had individually abolished slavery (Mississippi would finally do so in 1933, by which time there would be fewer than a thousand slaves in that state anyway), and a nationwide organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had emerged to call for constitutional amendments formally granting blacks full legal equality with whites, including voting rights. White resistance to greater rights for blacks continued, however, fueling the rise of such groups as the Cyclops Legion, which favored costumes consisting of pure-white robes and hoods bearing a stylized eye on the forehead. The Legion and its many imitators called themselves patriots and protectors of "the American way of life", but carried out that mission by terrorizing and sometimes brutally killing "uppity" blacks and troublesome white "radicals". In 1915, silent-film mogul D. W. Griffith would deliver a tremendous boost to such groups with his movie Defending a Nation, which depicted them as heroes; the Cyclops Legion would grow to an estimated membership of two million nationwide by the early 1920s before collapsing under the weight of a series of financial scandals involving its leaders, who had grown rich marketing Legion costumes and paraphernalia¹.