Chapter 18 of the APHSC book starts with the beginnings of the Plessy V. Ferguson case and explains how they play out. The books describes how Plessy was originally a Louisiana man, who was only 1/8 black, who sat in the “whites only” section of a rail car on a train traveling within Louisiana. The book states that Plessy committed the act specifically to get arrested and thus bring the law on trial. The case stayed in the lower courts for a while before finally reaching Judge Ferguson, who determined that the racist law was constitutional. Judge Ferguson was then called by a higher state court to show reasonable cause for upholding the law; and when Ferguson made his case, the Louisiana Supreme Court backed him up. The case was then taken to the Federal Supreme Court, where in 1896, it was decided that separate facilities for separate races was constitutional because it didn’t make one race lesser from a legal standpoint. Later the chapter discussed a case, Cummings V. Board of Education, which was a case decided in 1927. The backstory was that an Asian family wanted their daughter to go to an all-white school, but the school wouldn’t let her. The family sued the school saying, essentially, that it wasn’t fair that the only schools in town were for white students and there were no schools for people of color. The court agreed with the school board, noting that the Board did not have enough money to build and fund separate schools for races other than whites.