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How did Justice John Marshall Harlan compare Plessy v. Ferguson with the Dred Scott decision?

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Plessy v. Ferguson judgment — Plessy v. Ferguson *Plessy* v. *Ferguson* judgment, issued by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 18, 1896, advancing the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws.

In his dissenting opinion for Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice John Marshall Harlan famously criticized the Supreme Court's majority decision by comparing it to the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857.1

Harlan argued that the Court’s ruling, which upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine, would prove to be just as "pernicious" as the Dred Scott case. While the Dred Scott decision had infamously declared that African Americans were not entitled to the rights of U.S. citizenship, Harlan believed the Plessy ruling similarly consigned Black citizens to a permanent "condition of legal inferiority". By sanctioning racial segregation, he maintained that the Court was violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and ignoring the principle that the U.S. Constitution is "color-blind".12