This paper discusses that, although the Fourteenth Amendment granted
citizenship to the former slaves, the Supreme Court's
interpretation of this Amendment in "Plessy v. Ferguson", greatly harmed the civil rights movement. The author explains that in 1896, "Plessy v. Ferguson" determined that the standard of equal-but-separate accommodations for black and white passengers on the intrastate Louisiana train system was not in defiance of these Fourteenth Amendment rights. The author believes that, by making social equality the
problem of the community and not the government, the court effectively washed its hands of the problem of racism, deeming that phenomenon a social ill that may only be rectified at the grass roots level.