View the paragraph below and answer the questions below it.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Reading Breaking the Rules You may have heard the saying, “Some rules are meant to be broken.” In 1890, a man named Homer Plessy broke the rules. The state of Louisiana had passed the Separate Car Act, which required railway companies to have “separate but equal” train cars for black people and white people. A person who sat in the wrong car had to pay a $25 fine or go to jail for 20 days. You can probably guess that the cars for blacks weren’t as nice as the cars for whites. Not only that, it seemed unfair to make black people sit separately. A group of citizens called the “Free People of Color in New Orleans” formed a committee dedicated to repealing this law. They convinced Homer Plessy, who was 7/8 white and 1/8 black, to test the law by sitting in a whites-only train car. When Plessy was asked to move, he refused and was arrested. The Argument Plessy argued that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act violated the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. It says that states may not “deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” He argued that requiring black people to sit separately from white people implied that blacks were inferior to whites, and therefore unequal. So What? The Court’s decision set the stage for many more years of discrimination against people of color. Plessy’s case gave rise to a new doctrine: “separate but equal.” States were free to pass laws that kept races separate, and although the facilities were supposed to be equal, they rarely were. The “separate but equal” doctrine would not be abolished until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

1. Why was the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case important?
2. How was the case resolved?
3. What did “separate but equal,” mean?
4. What Supreme Court Case reversed “separate but equal?” (You must look this answer up)