that battle was Plessy vs. Ferguson. According to Tackach, this case concerned a piece of Jim Crow legislation that had been enacted in Louisiana in 1890. The Louisiana Railway Accommodations Act required all railway companies operating to: ...provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing separate coaches or compartments so as to secure separate accommodations... insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by his race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty five dollars or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days (Tackach 22). However, on June 7, 1982 a man - seven eights white and one eighth black - boarded a train in New Orleans and took a seat in the car reserved for white travelers. Although he was partly white, Louisiana law still considered this man a Negro. As a result, Homer Plessy was arrested by a detective and taken to the Criminal District Court of New Orleans. There, Judge John Ferguson issued the penalty required by law. Still, Plessy appealed and took his case to the Supreme Court of Louisiana; and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he referred to the Fourteenth Amendment (22). Finally, on May 6, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict. With a vote of seven to one, the Court maintained Plessy's conviction. Henry Billings, Associate Justice stated that meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law... but could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color. (22) He continued by stating that the segregation of the two races did not mean to imply that either race was inferior to the other in any way. Brown then stated that all laws should be followed and upheld for the promotion for the public good, and not for the annoyance... or a particular class. However, he added that a law demanding the division of races on public railways is no more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than that acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia. (22) Finally Brown concluded his opinion by stating: If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. (23) The Supreme Court's first major confrontation with the battle against segregation in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case ruled that separate, but equal facilities did not violate the demands of the Constitution. This caused a chain reaction throughout the United States. Many of the states began to pass laws that demanded racial segregation in every aspect of life. These separate, but equal laws were passed for restaurants, in voting; but most importantly, public education (U.S. Court Cases 155). The author of Brown v. Board of Education describes the first three decades of the twentieth century as segregated, but never equal, especially in the school system. Although state and local governments poured more and more money into the development of schools, those schools established for black students received only a fraction of the funds. According to Tackach, in 1910 southern states spent $9.45 per white child each year. However, only $2.90 was spent to each black child (Tackach 28). By 1916 the expenses for white children raised almost a full dollar, meanwhile, funds for black students lowered a cent. In The Soul of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois' study of African American education he states: The Negro colleges, founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and varying efficiency and grade; the normal high schools were doing little more than common-school work, and the common schools were training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and training these often too poorly. (Tackach 27) The black schools were inferior to those of white schools in almost everyway. Most of the buildings that were used as black schools were never kept in suitable conditio

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