Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, is a landmark in the United States Supreme Court ruling on state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses, under the separate but equal doctrine. The decision was reached by a vote of 7-1, with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Separate but equal remained a standard doctrine in American law until its rejection in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. Plessy v. Ferguson was the first major inquiry into the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdiction. Although the majority opinion did not contain the phrase separate but equal, it gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation through separate and supposedly equal public facilities and services for African Americans and white people. It served as a defining legal precedent until it was overturned by the ...