Separate But Equal Doctrine

Separate But Equal Doctrine derived from the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that state‐mandated separation of the races in public transportation did not violate the Thirteenth Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude or the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses so long as the facilities provided for the segregated races were equal.

In Plessy, all the justices save John Marshall Harlan assumed that the custom of segregation was so well established in the South and so beneficial to both races that it created no stigma in and of itself (see Segregation, De Jure). Citing rulings in interstate transportation cases in which the Court found that Louisiana could not prevent segregation by race in interstate travel (Hall v. Decuir, 1878) but Mississippi could segregate by race in intrastate carriers (louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway Co. v. Mississippi, 1890), Justice Henry B. *Brown held that “Laws permitting, and even requiring … separation [of the races], in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power” (p. 544).

In a series of cases commencing in 1898, the Court extended the separate but equal doctrine from public transportation to public education. Racial segregation of schools predated racial segregation in public transportation, and Justice Brown cited state school‐segregation rulings in Plessy. The first and most noteworthy of these rulings was Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), in which Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw decided that segregation of black schoolchildren did not violate the equality clause of the Massachusetts State Constitution. The Supreme Court followed Roberts in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) and Gong Lum v. Rice (1927). Under Jim Crow education laws, black schools were woefully financed, staffed, and maintained compared to white schools. Even when black students were provided with their own schools, they often had to go many miles past the “whites only” school in their neighborhood to reach the “colored” school. Moreover, they had to provide their own transportation while whites were bused to their schools.

From 1938 to 1950, the separate but equal doctrine was hobbled by a series of Court decisions requiring professional schools at state universities in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas to desegregate, and crippled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous Court, held that the separate but equal rationale in elementary school education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a series of per curiam decisions thereafter, the Court extended the Brown doctrine to other public facilities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave separate but equal doctrine its death blow, and the court upheld the constitutionality of the act in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964). The separate but equal doctrine was formally interred in Green v. School Board of New Kent County (1968), in which Justice William J. *Brennan announced that the Fourteenth Amendment could not be satisfied by anything less than unitary school systems.

See also Race and Racism.

Bibliography

Richard A. Kluger , Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1976).

Peter Charles Hoffer