Plessy v. Ferguson

By: Kate Tuttle

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Plessy v. Ferguson

Landmark case of 1896 in which the United States Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that permitted state-imposed racial segregation despite the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1892, thirty-year-old shoemaker Homer Plessy refused to leave his seat on a train in New Orleans, Louisiana, beginning a legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court's decision in this case, Plessy v. Ferguson, four years later permitted states to institute racially separate public accommodations. It would take nearly sixty years for the Court to reverse itself in a series of decisions beginning with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that overturned the judicial precedent for segregation. In Gayle v. Browder (1956), the Court specifically declared segregation in public transportation unconstitutional.

The segregated public transportation system that Plessy challenged in 1892 was relatively new to New Orleans. Train cars in New Orleans were first segregated in 1860, just before the Civil War. Those adorned with black stars were meant for black passengers only—a difficult rule to enforce, because of the many mixed-race people in New Orleans. Plessy himself, who was born free in 1862, was fair-skinned enough to pass for white. In 1867 the city removed the black stars from its trains, and the system returned to its earlier, integrated state.

But with the declining support of the Republican-controlled U.S. government, the effort to rebuild the South and bring full political rights to the former slaves after the Civil War faltered. Increasingly, Southern Democrats took back the power they had lost in Louisiana. In 1890 Democratic governor Francis T. Nicholls, who first gained office as part of an 1877 compromise balancing a Republican president with Democratic control of the South, signed a law resegregating Louisiana's railways. The law stated that train companies had to provide “equal but separate” cars for blacks and whites, and that individuals of different races could not ride together without risking a $25 fine or twenty days in jail. The Louisiana Senate passed the law by a vote of twenty-three to six.

African Americans and Creoles in New Orleans mobilized to fight the law. A columnist for a black-owned newspaper, Rodolphe Desdunes of The Crusader, proposed that African Americans boycott the train system. He wrote that blacks “can withdraw the patronage from these corporations and travel only by necessity.” But his idea did not take hold. Fears of violent white reprisals limited black political activism, and noted African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington preached patience and accommodation.

A Louisiana group calling itself the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, known as the Comité des Citoyens, planned to test the law's constitutionality—specifically, to prove that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees all persons “the equal protection of the laws.” Made up of prominent New Orleans blacks and whites, including Desdunes and The Crusader's publisher, Louis Martinet, the committee arranged for Plessy to board a whites-only train. By arrangement with contacts in the East Louisiana Railroad Company, a conductor asked Plessy, who was of mixed race, if he was a “colored man.” When Plessy said he was, and refused to move, the conductor and a private detective hired by the committee accompanied him to the police station, where he was booked and then released on $500 bond posted by a committee member.

Judge John H. Ferguson, a Massachusetts native, presided over Plessy's arraignment a month later. Ferguson had earlier ruled the Louisiana law unconstitutional when it demanded segregated train cars for travel between states. Martinet had written in The Crusader that with this decision, “Jim Crow is dead as a doornail.” But in Plessy's case, Ferguson sided with the state, saying that Louisiana, in compelling racial segregation in its in-state train system, had not violated African Americans' constitutional rights.

Louisiana's State Supreme Court agreed with Ferguson, citing a Massachusetts case that predated both the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment, Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), in which the state's chief justice had written that “prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law and cannot be changed by law.” In addition, Roberts was the source of the phrase “separate but equal.” The opinion also quoted a Pennsylvania case whose ruling rested upon the “natural, legal, and customary difference between the black and white races.”

Plessy's lawyer, white activist and writer Albion Tourgée, brought the case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Tourgée's brief argued that the Louisiana law “is obnoxious to the spirit of republican institutions, because it is a legalization of caste,” and that it violated both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments in limiting “the natural rights of man.”The Court ruled seven to one (one justice did not participate) that Plessy's constitutional rights had not been violated. Writing for the majority, Justice Henry B. Brown wrote that while the Fourteenth Amendment had “undoubtedly” been meant to enforce “absolute equality” between the races, it did not “abolish distinction based on color.” Brown cited many states' laws mandating separate schools and prohibiting interracial marriages—laws that were themselves ruled unconstitutional later. The opinion also said, “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions.”

Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Southerner, wrote a lone but strong dissent. He cited cases in which segregated juries had been found unconstitutional, and went on to say in plain language what Plessy's opponents would not admit: that the separate car law not only separated the races, but did so to accommodate white racial prejudice. “Our Constitution is color blind,” Harlan wrote, and legal segregation allowed “the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanctions of law.” He also wrote, “The thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations … will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done.”

Harlan's words proved prophetic. The Separate but Equal Doctrine relegated African American children to inadequate and unsafe schools, while the South's Jim Crow laws forbade black citizens from participating on an equal footing with white citizens. Not until the Supreme Court reversed itself in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, would African Americans be able to claim the rights promised in the Constitution.

See also Reconstruction; Segregation in the United States.

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