Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in
United States constitutional law that justified and permitted
racial segregation as not being in breach of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws. Under the doctrine, government was allowed to require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be separated along
racial lines, provided that the quality of each group's public facilities was equal. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate."