Historic Supreme Courts--14th Amendment, Episode 5: Separate But Equal: The Court That Sold Segregation

Here’s the moment it all comes together (and falls apart). This episode walks through how the Supreme Court took the 14th Amendment and quietly handed Jim Crow a legal seal of approval in Plessy v. Ferguson, while one lone justice, John Marshall Harlan, called out the cruelty of “separate but equal.”

Come along for the legal drama, the jaw-dropping reasoning, and the dissenter who seemed to be writing for the future. It’s a tough but important part of the story — and it explains so much about how segregation became built into American law.