Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson

Sources

Jim Crow. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Southern states made racial discrimination a matter of public policy by passing Jim Crow laws. Named after a 1830s minstrel-show character, these statutes maintained racial segregation and varied from state to state. In 1887 Florida became the first state to require whites and blacks to ride separately in railroad cars. Other states followed: Mississippi (1888), Texas (1889), Louisiana (1890), Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee (1891), and Kentucky (1892). The Louisiana law, “An Act to Promote the Comfort of Passengers,” required equal but separate accommodations for people of each race.

Homer Plessy’s Train Ride. On 7 June 1892 Homer A. Plessy bought a ticket and boarded an East Louisiana Railway train bound from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana. Plessy was an octoroon, a person of one-eighth black ancestry (one of his great-grandparents was African American). Someone told the conductor that Plessy was “colored,” who then instructed him to sit I in the “colored coach.” Plessy refused and was arrested. Brought before John H. Ferguson of the New Orleans district criminal court, Plessy was found guilty of violating the 1890 law. Plessy’s lawyers, Albion Tourgée and James Walker, filed a writ of certiorari that allowed the case to be taken to the state supreme court. In November 1892 state chief justice Francis Nichols, who had been governor in 1890, upheld the state law but granted a writ of error that brought Plessy’s case, now Plessy v. Ferguson, to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1896.

Tourgée’s Argument. Tourgée served as a judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction. His novel about his experiences, A Fool’s Errand (1879), remains one of the classic accounts of that difficult period. In arguing for Plessy, Tourgée developed two arguments. First, the law was unconstitutional because it violated the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Second, the state had deprived Plessy of his property, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy’s property, in this case, was the “reputation of being white.” Tourgée noted that Plessy appeared white, but the conductor had made the judgment that he was black and thus deprived him of “the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity.” Race prejudice barred any man labeled a Negro from the opportunity to succeed. Because Plessy, and many others labeled as “black,” were visibly white, the state had no reason to segregate them because of their race. Tourgée noted that the state law exempted black women hired to care for white children, who were permitted to travel with their charges. This exemption, Tourgée told the Court, “shows that the real evil lies not in the color of the skin but in the relation the colored person sustains to the white. If he is a dependent, it may be endured: if he is not, his presence is insufferable.” Instead of promoting the general comfort of passengers, as the law’s title suggested, it instead was “intended to promote the happiness of one class by asserting its supremacy and the inferiority of another class. Justice is pictured blind and her step-daughter, the Law, ought at least to be color-blind.” Tourgée speculated that the state would next require whites and blacks to walk on different sides of the street and to paint their houses different colors. He mockingly asked the Court if people with different hair or eye colors should also be segregated.

The Court’s Opinion. The court did not accept Tourgée’s argument. On 18 May 1896 Justice Henry Brown wrote for the majority that the state had the power to pass segregation laws. According to the Court, the Thirteenth Amendment only applied to actions whose purpose was to reintroduce slavery itself. The Fourteenth Amendment had extended legal rights to all citizens but had not abolished distinctions based on color. The law could not abolish these distinctions, anyway, Brown wrote, and social prejudices could not be overcome by legislation. Plessy may have been deprived of his reputation, but the laws requiring him to sit in a separate car did not really stigmatize him as inferior. If he felt stigmatized, Brown said, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” If blacks subjected whites to segregation, Brown was sure whites would not see it as proof of white inferiority.

Harlan’s Dissent. Justice John Harlan, who had dissented in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, found himself alone in dissent again in 1896. “In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.” He reasoned that the Court’s decision would encourage lawless attacks on citizens and would encourage states to continue challenging the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments. Harlan dismissed the idea advanced by proponents of segregation that separating the races prevented racial conflict. Instead of establishing racial harmony, the decision allowed states “under the sanction of law” to plant the “seeds of hate.” “What can more certainly arouse race hate, what can more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between the races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?”

Second-Class Citizens. Harlan concluded his dissenting opinion with one of the ringing statements for which he is best known. “In the view of the Constitution, in the eyes of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here.

Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings, or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.” In 1896 the Court affirmed the right of states to enshrine private prejudices in public law. Four years later a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper editor insisted that “God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated. The negro must stay on his side of the line and the white man must stay on his side,” and the sooner both accepted this the better it would be for them. States drew the line, mandating not only separate railroad cars, but separate schools, hotels, theaters, parks, drinking fountains, and restrooms. The doctrine of “separate but equal” would remain in place until 1954.

Sources

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537-564 (1895);

John E. Semonche, Charting the Future: The Supreme Court Responds to a Changing Society 1890-1920 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978);

C. Vann Woodward, “The Case of the Louisiana Traveler,” in Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution, edited by John A. Garraty (New York: Harper & Row, 1964);

Tinsley E. Yarbrough, Judicial Enigma: The First Justice Harlan (New I York: Oxford University Press, 1995).