[[File:ColoredDrinkingNegro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by Russell Lee.jpg |thumb|upright=1.2|An [[Oklahoma City]] streetcar terminal's "colored" drinking fountain, 1939<ref>{{cite web|last=Lee|first=Russell|title=Negro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma|work=Prints & Photographs Online Catalog|publisher=[[Library of Congress]] Home|date=July 1939|url=https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1997026728/PP/|access-date=March 23, 2005}}</ref>]]''Plessy'' legitimized state laws establishing "racial" segregation in the [[Southern United States|South]] and provided an impetus for further segregation laws. It also legitimized laws in the North requiring "racial" segregation, such as in the Boston school segregation case noted by Justice Brown in his majority opinion.<ref>{{cite book|last=Brands|first=H. W.|title=American Colossus|location=New York|publisher=Anchor Books|date=2010|page=466}}</ref> Legislative achievements won during the [[Reconstruction Era]] were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine.<ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/07/segregation-and-the-supreme-court/6055|title=Segregation and the Supreme Court|last=Sutherland| first=Arthur E. Jr. |author-link=Arthur E. Sutherland Jr.|magazine=The Atlantic Monthly|date=July 1954}}</ref> The doctrine had been strengthened also by an 1875 Supreme Court decision that limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs, guaranteeing to Congress only the power "to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation".<ref name="oldfield">{{cite journal |last1=Oldfield |first1=John |title=State politics, railroads, and Civil Rights in South Carolina, 1883–89 |journal=American Nineteenth Century History |date=January 2004 |volume=5 |issue=2 |pages=71–91 |doi=10.1080/1466465042000257864 |s2cid=144234514 }}</ref> The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of "race", guaranteeing the states' right to implement racially separate institutions, requiring them only to be equal.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/separate-but-equal.html|title=Separate But Equal: The Law of the Land|publisher=Smithsonian National Museum of American History Behring Center}}</ref>
[[File:JimCrowCar2.jpg|left|upright=1.2|thumb|1904 caricature of "White" and "[[Jim Crow]]" rail cars by [[John T. McCutcheon]]]]Despite the pretense of "separate but equal", non-whites essentially always received inferior facilities and treatment, if they received them at all.<ref>{{cite book|last=McCutheon|first=John |title=The Mysterious Stranger and Other Cartoons|publisher=McClure, Phillips & Co.|date=1905}}</ref>{{page needed|date=May 2021}}
