Under this doctrine, states could require separate schools, train cars, waiting rooms, hospitals and other public facilities for Black and white people. Courts rarely checked whether the facilities were actually equal. Southern states spent far more per white student than per Black student, and many Black schools lacked buildings, books and buses.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Charles Hamilton Houston and later Thurgood Marshall, attacked the doctrine step by step. It first won cases on graduate and law schools, such as Sweatt v. Painter in 1950, by showing the separate options were not equal. Then it argued that segregation itself was unequal.
In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The phrase is still used to describe systems that are formally neutral but produce unequal schools, neighborhoods and services by race.