Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy V. Ferguson
In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” The case enshrined the constitutional validity of racial segregation laws under what came to be known as the “separate but equal doctrine,” and it permitted the proliferation of mandatory segregation laws across the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These laws formed a pervasive web of racial rules, known as Jim Crow laws, requiring the separation of the races in public accommodations, schools, hospitals, and even cemeteries. Although most Jim Crow laws called for equal facilities, public accommodations and services under the segregated system were glaringly unequal. In addition, laws requiring racial segregation were extended in many jurisdictions to include not only African Americans and “people of color,” but also Native Americans and people of Chinese or Mexican descent.
The separate but equal doctrine operated to enforce a racial caste system that subordinated and disenfranchised nonwhites, denied them basic public services, isolated them in poor neighborhoods and schools, and limited their employment and educational opportunities. In the 1920s the Plessy case became the target of a litigation campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which, after many years of litigation, succeeded in overturning the separate but equal doctrine in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Before the American Civil War, racial distinctions existed in the law of virtually every state and territory of the United States. These laws prohibited or limited the migration of slaves and free Negroes, excluded Negroes from public accommodations, prohibited intermarriage, and imposed various civil disabilities on nonwhites. The codes governing the behavior of slaves in the South were particularly onerous, for they prohibited slaves from such activities as learning to read and write, carrying a weapon, or testifying in court. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Southern legislatures—still controlled by members of the former Confederacy—enacted Black Codes that resurrected much of the prewar slave-control legislation. Radical Republicans in Congress saw the actions of the former Confederate leaders as a threat to the Union and reacted by enacting federal civil rights statutes and extending federal protection to the civil and political rights of the former slaves.
During this postwar period, known as Reconstruction, three amendments were added to the federal Constitution to achieve these goals. The Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The Fourteenth Amendment extended federal and state citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and prohibited the states from enacting any law abridging the privileges and immunities of citizenship. It further declared that the states may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or deny any person “the equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment promised that the right to vote would not be denied or abridged because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
While federal troops occupied the South, former slaves voted in large numbers across the states of the former Confederacy and began to enjoy some level of political clout. Blacks served on juries, were elected to political office, and opened schools. In some areas a black middle class began to emerge and some public accommodations were desegregated. In 1877, however, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South following the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, the social and political position of blacks in Southern society began a long decline. White “Redeemers” regained control of Southern legislatures; the Ku Klux Klan enlarged its campaign of terror; the number of lynchings increased; whites used poll taxes, literacy tests, violence and fraud to prevent blacks from voting; and new racial segregation laws began to be passed.
In 1890, when the Louisiana legislature enacted a bill requiring the separation of the races in railroad travel, a group of black and mixed-race citizens in New Orleans determined to test the legislation in court. Led by prominent “persons of color” in the Creole community, notably Louis A. Martinet, they formed a Citizens’ Committee and hired Albion Tourgée, a well-known white lawyer, judge, carpetbagger, and activist for civil rights, to begin planning an appropriate test case.
The test case was initiated on June 7, 1892, when Homer Plessy, an octoroon (a person of one-eighth Negro ancestry), bought a first-class ticket for a trip from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, on the East Louisiana Railroad. As arranged in advance, Plessy was arrested when he refused to be seated in the car reserved for the colored race. In the state court, Plessy admitted that he had refused to take the assigned seat, but he asserted that he could not
be punished because the statute was unconstitutional. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the statute, and an appeal was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court.
THE MAJORITY DECISION
Before the Supreme Court, Plessy’s lawyers argued that the Louisiana statute violated the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution because it was designed to degrade blacks and impose a badge of servitude on them. Further, they claimed that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of due process, because any passenger wrongly identified as a colored passenger would be deprived of the status and reputation of being white, which were valuable property. They also argued that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause by restricting the personal right of citizens to freely enjoy all public privileges and by unjustly discriminating against one class of citizens.
In a seven-to-one ruling against Plessy, the Supreme Court rejected all of Plessy’s arguments. Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the majority, found no violation of the Thirteenth Amendment because the statute “merely implies a legal distinction between the white and colored races” and has “no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude.” Further, the statute presented no violation of the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause because any white man wrongly assigned to the colored coach could bring an action for damages against the railroad company. Most importantly, the statute did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it was a reasonable exercise of the state’s police power to legislate for the public good, taking into account “the established usages, customs and traditions of the people.”
In response to the argument that the separation of the races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority, Brown wrote, “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Finally, Brown rejected the idea that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, saying, “If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and a voluntary consent of individuals.” Brown did not note that members of different races would face criminal penalties if their natural affinities inclined them to sit together on the train.
THE DISSENT
Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky who became a Republican and a Union Army Colonel during the Civil War, wrote a lone dissenting opinion. For Harlan, the denial of equal civil rights to freed blacks in the South presented an affront to the federal power embodied in the Civil War Amendments, as well as a threat to the stability of the federal government. The states did not have the power, he asserted, to regulate the use of a public railroad by citizens on the basis of race. If a white man and black man chose to occupy the same public conveyance, he argued, it was their right to do so. The statute thus violated the personal liberty of members of both races.
Harlan rejected the majority’s conclusion that the statute did not discriminate against either race because it applied equally to both, saying “Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.” Harlan concluded that the law impermissibly stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. Although Harlan acknowledged the dominance of the white race in prestige, achievements, education, wealth, and power, he denied the authority of the legislature to draft laws that regulated the enjoyment of civil rights on the basis of race. “There is no caste here,” he wrote, “Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” To permit the states to legislate based on race would ignore the fact that “the destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together,” and it would allow the states “to plant the seeds of race hatred under the sanction of law.” Harlan predicted what would happen if similar statutes were enacted across the nation:
Slavery as an institution tolerated by law would, it is true, have disappeared from our country, but there would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, on the basis of race; and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community called the People of the United States.
Harlan’s dissent accurately predicted the effect of judicial approval of mandatory segregation laws. Such laws proliferated in the wake of Plessy and played an important role in consigning people of color to a second-class version of American citizenship. Harlan’s dissent also became important for its articulation of the concept of the color-blind Constitution. Legal color blindness, in the sense of the elimination of legal distinctions based on race, was a central goal of civil rights activists of the mid-twentieth century. Many believe that the ideal of color blindness still holds promise as a tool to be used in achieving racial equality.
On the other hand, the color-blind principle came to be used in the late twentieth century as a rallying cry for conservatives who sought to dismantle programs designed to remedy past discrimination, such as affirmative action programs or minority set-asides. Race-conscious measures designed to benefit historically disadvantaged racial groups are “color conscious” rather than “color blind.” Thus, color blindness is presently viewed by many as a weapon in a battle against minority efforts to improve equality.
SEE ALSO Color-Blind Racism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kluger, Richard. 1976. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Lofgren, Charles A. 1987. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stephenson, Gilbert Thomas. 1969 (1910). Race Distinctions in American Law. New York: Negro Universities Press.
Woodward, C. Vann. 1964. “The Case of the Louisiana Traveler.” In Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution, edited by John A. Garraty. New York: Harper & Row.
Molly Townes O’Brien