In 1896 the Supreme Court approved the principle of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson. The vote was 7 to 1. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the lone dissent: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
Thurgood Marshall later cited Harlan’s dissent in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that overturned Plessy.
Charles Evans Hughes, chief justice from 1930 to 1941, called a dissent “an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day.”