Court's opinion in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). In it the word "person" from the 14th Amendment's section has been given the broadest possible meaning by the U.S. Supreme Court: These provisions are universal in their application to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality, and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws. Thus, the Clause would not be limited to discrimination against African Americans, but would extend to other races, colors, and nationalities such as (in this case) legal aliens in the United States who are Chinese citizens. In its most contentious Gilded Age interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana Jim Crow law that required the segregation of blacks and whites on railroads and mandated separate railway cars for members of the two races. The Court, speaking through Justice Henry B. Brown, ruled that the Equal Protection Clause had been intended to defend equality in civil rights, not equality in social arrangements. All that was therefore required of the law was reasonableness, and Louisiana's railway law amply met that requirement, being based on "the established usages, customs and traditions of the people." Justice Harlan again dissented. "Every one knows," he wrote, Such "arbitrary separation" by race, Harlan concluded, was "a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution." Harlan's philosophy of constitutional colorblindness would eventually become more widely accepted, especially after World War II. Rights of Corporations In the decades after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the vast majority of Supreme Court cases interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment dealt with the rights of corporations, not with the rights of African Americans. In the period 1868-1912 (from ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the first known published count by a scholar), the Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in 312 cases dealing with the rights of corporations but in only 28 cases dealing with the rights of African Americans. Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment was used primarily by corporations to attack laws that regulated corporations, not to protect the formerly enslaved people from racial discrimination. Granting rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to business corporations was introduced into Supreme Court jurisprudence through a series of sleights of hands.