Georgia: “All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine.shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to two races within the same room at any time. Alabama: "It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.". Alabama: “Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.”. Buying, selling and the simplest activities of daily life - symbolized most famously by the simple water fountain - were firmly segregated by Jim Crow laws. “The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge, but in his own era and in the present, it has been the country’s business to enforce racial inequality. 
The convenient fiction of “separate but equal” was quickly abandoned and African Americans were treated as second-class citizens by institutions and laws that persist to this day. That distinction of social, as opposed to strictly legal, discrimination, provided the foundation for states to keep black and white people separated, particularly in social settings and social institutions such as marriage.
The Court’s decision was summarized by Chief Justice Henry Billings Brown, who stated that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” The legal principle of separate but equal was established in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Jim Crow laws started to come into effect, primarily but not exclusively in southern states, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
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