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You Choose - Essay Example vement aimed at enforcement of the guarantees of racial equality that were already contained in the Civil War (13th, 14th and 15th) Amendments to the US Constitution, as well as the Civil Rights Acts from the Reconstruction period. To the contrary, these guarantees were greatly undermined by subsequent US legislation. In fact, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 had even been declared unconstitutional within just a decade by Supreme Court rulings in 1883 on the basis that â€Å"Congress had no right to trespass on the states’ internal powers of economic regulation†. (Chambers Dictionary) The consequence of this was that the fundamental citizenship rights promised to the blacks were denied, and the existent status of blacks as slaves since the founding of the republic was exploited to pave the way for the practice of racial segregation. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 did provide for equal accommodation for both blacks and whites, but it was limited to public facilities that excluded schools. Moreover, its annulment by the 1883 Supreme Court ruling put an abrupt end to the even limited promised rights and reinforced segregation practices. The Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case resulted in another landmark Supreme Court ruling wherein the segregation of blacks and whites was further legitimized by expounding the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. â€Å"Plessy set the precedent that ‘separate’ facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were ‘equal’.† (Landmark cases). In this case, legislation was permitted to make distinctions based on race as long as neither was deprived of rights or privileges. Consequently, this doctrine was applied in many public places such as schools, restaurants, department stores, libraries, theatres, transportation etc. In effect, this created an unnecessary duplication of services, but the inequalities and inconveniences that black people faced can easily be imagined. From a legal perspective it also demonstrated the