What was the main effect of the supremes courts 1896 ruling in plessy vs ferguson

Plessy vs. Ferguson legitimized the move towards segregation practices begun earlier in the South. Along with Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise address, delivered the previous year, which accepted black social isolation from white society, Plessy provided an opportunity for further segregation laws. Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The doctrine was further justified by a previous Supreme Court decision in 1875 which limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs only guaranteeing congress the power “to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation”. The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of race. The case of Plessy v. Ferguson guaranteed the state’s right to implement racially separate institutions requiring them only to be “equal”. The prospect of greater state influence in matters of race worried numerous advocates of civil equalities including Supreme Court justice John Harlan who wrote in his dissent of the Plessy decision, “we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law, when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master." Harlan’s concerns about the entrenchment on the 14th Amendment would prove well founded as states benefitted to institute segregation based law that would become popularized as the Jim Crow system.