When his case was heard in criminal court four months later, Judge John Howard Ferguson chose not to hold a trial and instead, he upheld the constitutionality of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, which enabled Plessy’s legal team to appeal the decision and keep Plessy out of jail.

Plessy’s lawyer, Albion Tourgée, then appealed the ruling before the Louisiana Supreme Court, arguing that the Separate Car Act violated the 14th Amendment, which, ratified in 1868, guaranteed equal protection under the law. But the higher court upheld Judge Ferguson’s decision.

It would be four years until the Supreme Court heard Plessy v. Ferguson.

In his argument before the Court, Tourgée asserted that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was a sham. “Its only effect is to perpetuate the stigma of color — to make the curse immortal, incurable, inevitable,” he argued.

His words fell on mostly deaf ears. On May 18, 1896, the justices, eight white men of privilege, ruled against Plessy, 7-1.

The sole dissent was by Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentucky native and Civil War veteran, who famously declared, “Our Constitution is color blind.”

The ruling came to be regarded as one of the most ignominious in the Supreme Court’s history. It would define the Jim Crow era, in which people of color were summarily segregated from not only trains but also schools, theaters, public buildings, lodgings, lunch counters and much else over the next 58 years, until the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously dismissed the “separate but equal” doctrine in ruling in 1954 that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

By then Plessy had long been dead.

Plessy’s train-car protest presaged Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, but where she became revered in civil rights lore, he all but vanished into obscurity, his name synonymous with an odious Supreme Court ruling.