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Separate but equal is a set phrase that systems of segregation giving different "colored only" facilities or services with the declaration that the quality of each group's public facilities remain equal.
United States
The American Civil War (1861–1865) policy yielded the cessation of most legal slavery in the U.S., upon which the separate but equal laws became officially established throughout the United States and represented the institutionalization of the segregation period. Blacks were entitled to receive the same public services such as schools, bathrooms, and water fountains, but the 'separate but equal' doctrine mandated different facilities for the two groups. The legitimacy of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537.
The facilities and social services exclusive to African-Americans were of lower quality than those reserved for whites; for example, many African-American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools.
The repeal of "separate but equal" laws was a key focus of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), attorneys for the NAACP referred to the phrase "equal but separate" used in Plessy v. Ferguson as a custom de jure racial segregation enacted into law. The NAACP, led by the soon-to-be first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, was successful in challenging the constitutional viability of the separate but equal doctrine, and the court voted to overturn sixty years of law that had developed under Plessy. The Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the state level. The companion case of Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 outlawed such practices at the Federal level in the District of Columbia. In 1967 under Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage ("anti-miscegenation laws") in the United States.
In 2008, "separate but equal" concept still exist, especially on marriage laws in most states in the US for homosexual couples. In 1996, the United States Congress passed the -Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman amongst other stipulations. As of November 2008, twenty-nine states have passed constitutional amendments explicitly barring the recognition of same-sex marriage, nineteen of which prohibit the legal recognition of any same-sex union. Nineteen additional states have legal statutes that define "marriage" as a union of two persons of the opposite-sex. The territory of Puerto Rico ratified a similar statute in 1998. Nonetheless, some states are beginning to offer legal recognition to same-sex couples, whether in the form of marriage or as civil unions or domestic partnerships, since civil unions and domestic partnerships are separate, but equal, to marriage.
American constitutional scholars have debated whether DOMA violates the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution and whether the federal government has the power to regulate marriage at all, since marriage law has been reserved to the states since the formation of the US.[citation needed] President-elect Barack Obama's political platform includes full repeal of the DOMA.
