| 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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| Full case name | Homer A. Plessy v. Ferguson | |||||
| Citations | 163 U.S. 537 (more) 16 S. Ct. 1138; 41 L. Ed. 256; 1896 U.S. LEXIS 3390 |
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| Prior history | Ex parte Plessy, 11 So. 948 (La. 1892) | |||||
| Subsequent history | None | |||||
| Holding | ||||||
| The "separate but equal" provision of private services mandated by state government is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. | ||||||
| Court membership | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Majority | Brown, joined by Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham | |||||
| Dissent | Harlan | |||||
| Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. | ||||||
| Laws applied | ||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV; 1890 La. Acts 152 | ||||||
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Overruled by
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| Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) | ||||||
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), 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 private businesses (particularly railroads), 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. Associate Justice David Josiah Brewer was absent at the ruling because of his daughter's sudden death the day before. "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 (Committee of Citizens), which had brought the suit and arranged for Homer Plessy's arrest in order to challenge Louisiana's segregation law, replied, “We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.”[1]
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In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, the Free People of Color in New Orleans formed the Committee of Citizens -- a group dedicated to the repeal of that law. Their members included Arthur Esteves, C.C. Antoine, Firmin Chrisophe, C.G. Johnston, Paul Bonseigneur, Laurent Auguste, Rudolph B. Baquie, Rudolphe L. Desdunes, Louis A. Martinet, Numa E. Mansion, L.J. Joubert, Frank Hall, Noel Bacchus, George Geddes and A.E. P. Albert. They eventually persuaded Homer Plessy to test it. Plessy was born a free man and was an "octoroon" (someone of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent). However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car. [2]
On June 7, 1892, Plessy boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana, that was designated for use by white patrons only, as mandated by state law. [3] The railroad company had been informed already as to Plessy's racial lineage, and after Plessy had taken 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.[4] Plessy was remanded for trial in Orleans Parish, despite his objections that the Louisiana law was in violation of the Constitution of the United States. He was convicted and sentenced to pay a $25 fine.
In his case, Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, Plessy 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. However, the judge presiding over his case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies as long as they operated within state boundaries. Plessy 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 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. Tourgee argued that the reputation of being a white man was "property," which, by the law, implied the inferiority of African-Americans as opposed to whites.
In a 7 to 1 decision handed down on May 18, 1896 (Justice David Josiah Brewer did not participate, due to the death of his daughter),[5] 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 poorer than those designated 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 (1857). As heralded as this dissent may be, in which Harlan called for a "color-blind" constitution, it should be noted that he did not view all races as equal. In his dissent, Harlan highlighted the plight of blacks by pointing out that the Chinese, a race he viewed as inferior, could still ride with whites. "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," he wrote.[6]
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" originated with papers filed with the court by "The Citizen’s Committee."[7]
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 pled guilty to the violation and paid the fine.
Plessy legitimized the move towards segregation practices begun earlier 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 was further justified by a previous Supreme Court decision in 1875, which limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs, only guaranteeing Congress the power “to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation."[8] The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of race. The case of Plessy v. Ferguson guaranteed 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 equalities 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."[9] Harlan’s concerns about the entrenchment on the 14th Amendment would prove well founded as states benefited to institute segregation based law that would become popularized as the Jim Crow system.
The effect was immediate as noted through significant racial differences in educational funding emerging in the late 1890s that would prove enormous by the 20th century. States which had previously successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased reconstruction era efforts.[10] An example of this is the state of Louisiana wherein integrated interracial labor solidarity and interracial sporting competition had completely disappeared by the end of the 1890s. Jim Crow laws would spread northward in response to a second wave of African American immigration and would eventually extend to segregated educational facilities, separate public institutions such as hotels and restaurants, separate beaches among other public facilities, restrictions on interracial marriage among numerous other facets of daily life.[10] Unfortunately, the separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African American community were consistently inferior to those provided to the White community and contradicted the vague declaration of “separate but equal” institutions issued after the Plessy decision.[11]
Jim Crow legislation related to voting would quietly disenfranchise the Southern African American by requiring of prospective voters proof of land ownership or literacy tests at poll stations. Most African Americans were for the most part uneducated former slaves often leasing land from their former owners and immediately lost their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the political system. Black community leaders who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era lost any gains made when their voters disappeared. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject “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.[12] The “separate but equal” doctrine would characterize American society until the doctrine was ultimately overturned during the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the players on both sides of the Supreme Court case, have announced 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.[13]
"It is no longer Plessy v Ferguson. It is Plessy and Ferguson," said Keith Plessy in a Public Broadcasting radio interview[14] with WWNO in New Orleans on February 12, 2009, the day that historians gathered with the Plessy and Ferguson families and a member of the Louisiana Supreme Court to unveil a historical marker recalling the case, according to an article in The Times-Picayune[15]
The marker was placed on the corner of Press and Royal Streets, marking the spot in 1892 where Homer Plessy was, in an act of planned civil disobedience, thrown off the railway car and arrested.[14]
A modest plaque, located on the corner of Press Street and Royal Street just outside of the French Quarter, stands as a memorial to Homer Plessy in the place where he boarded the whites-only railcar. It is located in an abandoned park, across the street from the rail-line that was once the life blood of the city.