Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified and permitted racial segregation as not being in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws. Under the doctrine, government was allowed to require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be separated along racial lines, provided that the quality of each group's public facilities was equal. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate."

Separate But Equal is a 1991 American television movie depicting the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, based on the phrase "Separate but equal".