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culture—in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a very light-skinned, racially mixed man, had made a planned attempt to challenge Louisiana’s 1890 law requiring segregated streetcars. His lawyer, Albion Tourgee, a northern white Reconstruction official and popular novelist, had argued the case on the grounds that the government did not have the right to determine the racial identities of its citizens. But the Supreme Court decided
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Grace Elizabeth Hale (Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940)