Homer Plessy, seven-eighths white, deliberately violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act to test its constitutionality. The Court upheld it 7–1, ruling that laws requiring 'separate but equal' facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because separation did not, in itself, imply inequality. Justice Harlan's lone dissent — 'Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens' — became one of the most quoted passages in constitutional history. Plessy provided the legal scaffolding for six decades of Jim Crow segregation before being overruled by Brown v. Board of Education.