Plessy v. Ferguson
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| Plessy v. Ferguson | ||||||||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued April 13, 1896 Decided May 18, 1896 |
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| Holding | ||||||||||||||
| The "separate but equal" provision of public accommodations by state governments is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. | ||||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Melville Fuller Associate Justices: Stephen Johnson Field, John Marshall Harlan, Horace Gray, David Josiah Brewer, Henry Billings Brown, George Shiras, Jr., Edward Douglass White, Rufus Wheeler Peckham |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||||
| Majority by: Brown Joined by: Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham Dissent by: Harlan Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV; 1890 La. Acts 152 | ||||||||||||||
| Overruled by | ||||||||||||||
| Brown v. Board of Education, | ||||||||||||||
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding segregation and the constitutionality of the "separate but equal" doctrine.
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[edit] Background
Immediately after the end of the American Civil War in 1865, during the period known as Reconstruction, the federal government was able to provide some protection for the civil rights of the newly-freed slaves. But when Reconstruction abruptly ended in 1877 and federal troops were withdrawn, southern state governments began passing Jim Crow Laws that prohibited blacks from using the same public accommodations as whites. The Supreme Court had ruled, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the actions of government, not to those of private individuals, and consequently did not protect persons against individuals or private entities who violated their civil rights. In particular, the Court invalidated most of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a law passed by Congress to protect Blacks from private acts of discrimination.
In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, several black and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to the repeal of that law. They persuaded Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black (an octoroon in the now-antiquated parlance), to test it. In 1892, Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans. The train provided only third-class cars to black passengers. He was arrested when he refused to leave his seat. It is interesting to note that, since only 1/8 of his ancestory was black, Plessy appeared to be a white man, and consequently he had to inform the conductor of his herritage before any objection was even made to his seat choice.
[edit] The Decision
The 7–1 decision authored by Justice Henry Billings Brown upheld the Louisiana statute.
The court rejected Plessy's arguments based on the Thirteenth 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 fostered any inferiority of Blacks, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, held rather that the law merely separated the races as a matter of social policy.
Justice Brown finally 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 and cafés, where the facilities designated for blacks were poorer than those designated for whites.
Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveowner who experienced a conversion as a result of Ku Klux Klan excesses, and champion of black civil rights, wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the court's decision would become as infamous as that in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Harlan went on to say:
But in 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.
As an aftermath, 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 $25 fine.
[edit] Influence of Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy legitimized the move towards segregation practices begun earlier in the South. Along with Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise address, delivered the same year, which accepted black social isolation from white society, Plessy provided an impetus for further segregation laws. In the ensuing decades, segregation statutes proliferated, reaching even to the federal government in Washington, D.C., which re-segregated during Woodrow Wilson's administration in the 1910s.
William Rehnquist wrote a memo called "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued that "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." He continued, "To the argument... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are." [1][2]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Fireside, Harvey, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism, Carroll & Graf, New York, 2004 jcy
- Medley, Keith Weldon, We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson, Pelican Publishing Company, March, 2003
