The 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford stands with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) as the most reviled in the Court’s history. Plessy held that “separate but equal” facilities for whites and nonwhites were constitutional and remained the law of the land until the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The core holding in Dred Scott—that freed African American former slaves could not be citizens of the United States and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional—were essentially reversed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War Amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) creating a national right of citizenship to all persons born in the United States, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibiting the federal government and the states from denying the right to vote based on race or “previous condition of servitude.”