Final answer:
The Supreme Court claimed that racial segregation was lawful under the 'separate but equal' doctrine when upholding Louisiana's Separate Car Act in Plessy v. Ferguson, stating that it did not violate the Equal Protection Clause if both races were treated equally.
Step-by-step explanation:
Supreme Court's Ruling on the Separate Car Act
In upholding Louisiana's Separate Car Act, the Supreme Court claimed that racial segregation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities provided to each race were separate but equal. This principle was asserted in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. The Court's decision was nearly unanimous, with an 8-1 vote, where the majority held that the segregation of railroad cars in Louisiana did not imply discrimination or the inferiority of African Americans.
Furthermore, the Court argued that if the separation of races was seen as inferential, it was not due to the law itself but rather because of the perception of the colored race, undermining the claim of Homer Plessy's lawyers that the law denied him equal protection. The infamous phrase from the Court's ruling was "separate but equal," an ethos that would provide justification for de jure segregation for decades until it was eventually overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Dissenting Justice John Marshall Harlan argued that the Constitution was colorblind and that the law was inherently unequal, predicting that the Court's decision would become as pernicious as the Dred Scott case. However, it would not be until later Supreme Court decisions and Civil Rights action that the principle of "separate but equal" would be dismantled.