Final answer:
The true statement reflects historical facts: the Supreme Court's 'separate but equal' ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson permitted racial segregation under the flawed assumption that it did not breach the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, solidifying racial discrimination through Jim Crow laws.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statement posed in the question is indeed true. After the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed to secure equal protection under the laws for African Americans, the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld the doctrine of 'separate but equal'. This decision meant that racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, as long as the segregated facilities provided to each race were considered equal.
However, the reality was that the facilities and services offered to African Americans were almost always inferior. This legal endorsement of segregation allowed for the widespread implementation of Jim Crow laws across the South, which solidified a system of racial discrimination and inequality.
Despite the Fourteenth Amendment's clear statement prohibiting states from denying 'equal protection of the laws' to any person, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson misinterpreted this as not requiring racial integration. This laid the groundwork for decades of entrenched racial segregation, which would not be legally dismantled until the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, most notably with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned 'separate but equal' and kickstarted the process of desegregating public schools.
The civil rights struggle would continue well into the latter half of the 20th century, highlighting the inadequacy of 'separate but equal' and fighting against systemic racism that the Plessy ruling had allowed to persist.