To really understand how, we need to go back about fifty years to 1896. In that year a black man named Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a whites-only railroad car. Was it legal for the railroads to separate people because of color? The Supreme Court listened to arguments in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1898 Justice Henry Billings Brown, a wealthy man originally from New England, wrote the decision for the majority of the justices: "The Fourteenth Amendment calls for the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social equality, or a commingling of the races ." What he meant was that though the races were equal before the law, local laws could prevent people of different races from mingling. The Supreme Court's decision was that if public facilities were equal they could be separate .

Now let's fast forward back to the 1950s. Because of Plessy v. Ferguson segregation is legal in schools, restaurants, hotels, and public places throughout the southern states. Separate but equal is the law.