By the time Homer A. Plessy, a New Orleans octoroon (a person with one-eighth Negro blood) challenged that city’s right to segregate public transportation by riding in a “Whites Only” railcar, the constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War to provide protections and rights for Negro citizens had eroded. The Louisiana state courts ruled against Plessy, and his subsequent appeal, against the ruling by Judge John Howard Ferguson, to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied in 1896. The impact of Plessy was to relegate blacks to second-class citizenship. They were separated from whites by law and by private action in transportation, public accommodations, recreational facilities, churches, cemeteries, and school in both Northern and Southern states.