Florida Civic Literacy Court Cases Practice Test

The main idea here is how the Fourteenth Amendment protects equal treatment under the law. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the central question was whether state-mandated racial segregation violated that Equal Protection Clause. The Court said that segregation could be permissible if the separate facilities were equal in quality, giving rise to the famous “separate but equal” doctrine. The Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, was not the basis for the ruling in this case. So the key constitutional issue is the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, not the Thirteenth.