Plessy v. Ferguson is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence
of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation
in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal".
The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by
Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Louisiana
Justice Edward Douglass White was one of the majority: he was a member of the New Orleans
Pickwick Club and the Crescent City White League, the latter a paramilitary organization
that had supported white supremacy with violence through the 1870s to suppress black voting
and regain political power by white Democrats. Previous "Separate but equal" remained standard
doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v.
Board of Education. After the Supreme Court ruling, the New Orleans
Comité des Citoyens, which had brought the suit and had arranged for Homer Plessy's arrest
in an act of civil disobedience in order to challenge Louisiana's segregation law, stated,
"We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred."
Background
In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for
blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, a group
of prominent black, creole, and white New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens
dedicated to repeal the law. They eventually persuaded Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race,
to participate in an orchestrated test case. Plessy was born a free man and was an "octoroon".
However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, and thus required to sit in the
"colored" car. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class
ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "whites only" car of the East Louisiana
Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana. The railroad company,
which opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars,
had been previously informed of Plessy's racial lineage, and the intent to challenge the law.
Additionally, the committee hired a private detective with arrest powers to detain Plessy,
to ensure he was charged for violating the Separate Car Act, as opposed to a vagrancy
or some other offense. After Plessy took a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was
asked to vacate it, and sit instead in the blacks-only car. Plessy refused and was arrested
immediately by the detective. As planned, the train was stopped, and Plessy was taken
off the train at Press and Royal streets. Plessy was remanded for trial in Orleans Parish.
In his case, Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, Plessy's lawyers argued that
the state law which required East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him
his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution,
which provided for equal treatment undedr the lawHowever, the judge presiding over his
case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies
while they operated within state boundaries. Plessy was convicted and sentenced to pay
a $25 fine. Plessy immediately sought a writ of prohibition.
The Committee of Citizens took Plessy's appeal to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, where he
again found an unreceptive ear, as the state Supreme Court upheld Judge Ferguson's ruling.
Undaunted, the Committee appealed to the United States Supreme Court in 1896. Two legal briefs
were submitted on Plessy's behalf. One was signed by Albion W. Tourgée and James C.
Walker and the other by Samuel F. Phillips and his legal partner F. D. McKenney. Oral
arguments were held before the US Supreme Court on April 13, 1896. Tourgée and Phillips
appeared in the courtroom to speak on behalf of Plessy.
Tourgée built his case upon violations of Plessy's rights under the Thirteenth Amendment,
prohibiting slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees the same rights to all citizens
of the United States, and the equal protection of those rights, against the deprivation of
life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Tourgée argued that the reputation
of being a black man was "property", which, by the law, implied the inferiority of African
Americans as compared to whites. Decision and dissent
In a 7 to 1 decision handed down on May 18, 1896, the Court rejected Plessy's arguments
based on the Fourteenth Amendment, seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated
it. In addition, the majority of the Court rejected the view that the Louisiana law implied
any inferiority of blacks, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, it contended
that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy.
When summarizing, Justice Brown declared, "We consider the underlying fallacy of the
plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races
stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. 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." While the Court did not find a difference
in quality between the whites-only and blacks-only railway cars, this was manifestly untrue in
the case of most other separate facilities, such as: public toilets, cafés, and public
schools, where the facilities designated for blacks were consistently of lesser quality
than those for whites. Justice John Marshall Harlan, who decried
the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the
court's decision would become as infamous as that of Dred Scott v. Sandford Following
is part of Justice Harlan's dissent, asserting, "The law regards man as man":
[I]n view of the constitution, in the eye 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.
Some commentators, such as Gabriel J. Chin and Eric Maltz, have viewed Harlan's Plessy
dissent in a more critical light, and suggested it be viewed in context with his other decisions.
Maltz has argued that "modern commentators have often overstated Harlan's distaste for
race-based classifications," pointing to other aspects of decisions in which Harlan was involved.
Both point to a passage of Harlan's Plessy dissent as particularly troubling: "There
is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become
citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely
excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question,
a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States,
while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives
for the preservation of the Union", he wrote. New Orleans historian Keith Weldon Medley,
author of We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson, The Fight Against Legal Segregation, said
the words in Justice Harlan's "Great Dissent" were taken from papers filed with the court
by "The Citizen's Committee". The case helped cement the legal foundation
for the doctrine of separate but equal, the idea that segregation based on classifications
was legal as long as facilities were of equal quality. However, Southern state governments
refused to provide blacks with genuinely equal facilities and resources in the years after
the Plessy decision. The states not only separated races but, in actuality, ensured differences
in quality. In January 1897, Homer Plessy pleaded guilty to the violation and paid the
fine. Influence
Plessy legitimized the state laws establishing racial segregation in the South and provided
an impetus for further segregation laws. Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction
Era were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The doctrine had been
strengthened also by an 1875 Supreme Court decision that limited the federal government's
ability to intervene in state affairs, guaranteeing only Congress the power "to restrain states
from acts of racial discrimination and segregation". The ruling basically granted states legislative
immunity when dealing with questions of race, guaranteeing the state's right to implement
racially separate institutions, requiring them only to be "equal".
The prospect of greater state influence in matters of race worried numerous advocates
of civil equality, including Supreme Court Justice John Harlan who wrote in his dissent
of the Plessy decision, "we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law, when the rights
of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection
which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master."
Harlan's concerns about the entrenchment on the 14th Amendment would prove well founded;
states proceeded to institute segregation-based laws that became known as the Jim Crow system.
In addition, from 1890 to 1908, Southern states passed new or amended constitutions including
provisions that effectively disfranchised blacks and thousands of poor whites.
The effect of the Plessy ruling was immediate; there were already significant differences
in funding for the segregated school system, which continued into the 20th century; states
consistently underfunded black schools, providing them with substandard buildings, textbooks,
and supplies. States which had successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly
adopted oppressive legislation that erased reconstruction era efforts. The principles
of Plessy v. Ferguson were reaffirmed in Lum v. Rice, which upheld the right of a Mississippi
public school for white children to exclude a Chinese American girl. Despite the laws
enforcing compulsory education, and the lack of public schools for Chinese children in
Lum's area, the Supreme Court ruled that she had the choice to attend a private school.
Jim Crow laws and practices spread northward in response to a second wave of African-American
migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities. Some established de jure segregated
educational facilities, separate public institutions such as hotels and restaurants, separate beaches
among other public facilities, and restrictions on interracial marriage, but in other cases
segregation in the North was related to unstated practices and operated on a de facto basis,
although not by law. among numerous other facets of daily life.
The separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African-American community were consistently
inferior to those provided to the White community. This contradicted the vague declaration of
"separate but equal" institutions issued after the Plessy decision.
From 1890 to 1908, state legislatures in the South disfranchised most blacks and many poor
whites through rejecting them for voter registration and voting: making voter registration more
difficult by providing more detailed records, such as proof of land ownership or literacy
tests administered by white staff at poll stations. African-American community leaders,
who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era and even into the 1880s,
lost gains made when their voters were excluded from the political system. Historian Rogers
Smith noted on the subject that "lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that
such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white
primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white
race that declared itself supreme", notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to
the American Constitution. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education,
the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional.
Plessy v. Ferguson was never overturned by the Supreme Court. But, the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 prohibited legal segregation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided for federal
oversight and enforcement of voter registration voting.
Plessy and Ferguson Foundation In 2009 Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson,
descendants of actors on both sides of the 1896 Supreme Court case, announced establishing
the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. The foundation will work
to create new ways to teach the history of civil rights through film, art, and public
programs designed to create understanding of this historic case and its effect on the
American conscience. Plaque at railyard site
Historians gathered with the Plessy and Ferguson families and a member of the Louisiana Supreme
Court in New Orleans on February 12, 2009, to unveil a historical marker that memorializes
the case. "It is no longer Plessy v Ferguson. It is Plessy and Ferguson", said Keith Plessy
in a Public Broadcasting radio interview. The marker was placed on the corner of Press
and Royal Streets, near the location of the former railway station where Plessy had boarded
his train. References
Further reading Thomas, Brook. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief
History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. ISBN 978-0-312-14997-0.
Chin, Gabriel J.. "The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases". Iowa Law Review
82: 151. SSRN 1121505. Elliott, Mark. Color-Blind Justice: Albion
Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson.
New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-518139-5. Fireside, Harvey. Separate and Unequal: Homer
Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll & Graf.
ISBN 0-7867-1293-7. Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. Plessy v. Ferguson:
Race and Inequality in Jim Crow America 219 pages
Lofgren, Charles A.. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-19-505684-6. Medley, Keith Weldon. We As Freemen: Plessy
v. Ferguson. Gretna, LA: Pelican. ISBN 1-58980-120-2. Review
Tushnet, Mark. I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon
Press. pp. 69–80. ISBN 978-0-8070-0036-6. External links
Text of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 is available from: Findlaw Justia LII
Text of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 is available from: Findlaw Justia LII
Case Brief for Plessy v. Ferguson at Lawnix.com