Separate But Equal
From dKosopedia
A code phrase to describe systems of segregation giving different "colored only" facilities or services for blacks, with the declaration that the quality of each group's public facilities were (supposedly) to remain equal. In intention and practice they were highly unequal. In 1896 the Supreme Court accepted this legal theory in deciding Plessy v. Ferguson, thus created the de jure Jim Crow era, which continued until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that "separate but equal" facilities are inherently unequal.