Plessy v. Ferguson

In Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), the Supreme Court upheld an 1890 Louisiana statute that required railroads to provide separate but equal accommodations for blacks and whites and forbade persons from riding in cars not assigned to their race. It gave constitutional sanction to virtually all forms of racial segregation in the United States until after World War II.

Plessy arose as part of a careful strategy to test the legality of the new Louisiana law. In September 1891, elite "persons of color" in New Orleans formed the Citizens Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. They raised three thousand dollars for the costs of a test case. Albion Tourgee, the nation's leading white advocate of black rights, agreed to take the case without fee. Tourgee, a former judge, was a nationally prominent writer most noted for his novel about Reconstruction, A Fool's Errand.

In June 1892, Homer A. Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad, sat in the "white" car, and was promptly arrested and arraigned before Judge John H. Ferguson. Plessy then sued to prevent Ferguson from conducting any further proceedings against him. Eventually his challenge reached the United States Supreme Court.

Before the Supreme Court, Tourgee argued that segregation violated the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude and denied blacks equal protection of the law, which was guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. These amendments, along with the Declaration of Independence, Tourgee asserted, gave Americans affirmative rights against invidious discrimination. He asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment gave constitutional life to the Declaration of Independence, "which is not a fable as some of our modern theorists would have us believe, but [is] the all-embracing formula of personal rights on which our government is based." Joining Tourgee in these arguments was Samuel F. Phillips, a former solicitor general of the United States, who in 1883 had unsuccessfully argued the civil rights cases.

The Court rejected Tourgee's arguments by a vote of seven to one. In his majority opinion, Justice Henry Billings Brown conceded that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted "to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law," but asserted that the amendment "could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races." Ignoring the reality of the emerging Jim Crow South, the Court denied that "the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority." Brown believed that segregation was not discriminatory because whites were also segregated from blacks. Thus, if segregation created a perception of inferiority "it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it." Reflecting the accepted social science and popular prejudices of his age, Brown argued:

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

Thus, as long as segregated facilities were "equal," they were permissible. Segregation had now received the sanction and blessing of the Supreme Court.

In a bitter, lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, acknowledged that the "white race" was "the dominant race in this country." But, as Harlan read the Constitution, there was in the eye of the law no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens and no caste. The Constitution was color-blind, and neither knew nor tolerated classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens were equal before the law and the humblest the peer of the most powerful. The law regarded "man as man" and took no account of surroundings or color when civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land were involved. Harlan protested that the Court's decision would "stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens" and "encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments to the Constitution." In prophetic language, he asserted, "The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done." Harlan argued that the Louisiana law was "inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black" and "hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States."

More than five decades would pass before the Supreme Court recognized the fundamental truth of Harlan's dissent. Meanwhile, the South built a social and legal system rooted in racial segregation. In January 1897, Homer Plessy pled guilty to attempting to board a "white" railroad car and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine.

See also Fourteenth Amendment; Jim Crow; Thirteenth Amendment

Bibliography

Finkelman, Paul, ed. Race, Law, and American History. Vol. 4, The Age of Jim Crow: Segregation from the End of Reconstruction to the Great Depression. New York: Garland, 1992.

Kull, Andrew. The Color Blind Constitution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Lofgren, Charles A. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (1954; originally published as The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 ). New York: Collier, 1965.

Medley, Keith Wheldon. We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Pelican, 2003.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

paul finkelman (1996)
Updated bibliography