The 14th Amendment sternly informed Democrats that they would have to stop. Democrats dropped slavery but desperately clung to state-sanctioned race discrimination for another hundred years. It took a Supreme Court ruling in 1954 and a Republican president sending in the National Guard to force Democrats to stop their infernal race discrimination. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause prohibited the states from engaging in race discrimination in education. Democrats responded with massive resistance. Ann writes as though the segregationists were clearly violating the law. However, segregation's legality was upheld by numerous court decisions, notably Plessy v. Ferguson. Those decisions may well have been wrong, as courts now say they were. But at the time they were the law.