In a previous post about the Jim Crow laws era, I briefly mentioned the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, which was where the Supreme Court legalized racial segregation. In today’s post, I would like to go into more detail about the case.
Homer Plessy was a man of color born free. He was participating in a protest test case organized by the Comité des Citoyens, a community group that worked to stop railroad car segregation mandated by the state of Louisiana due to the passing of the Separate Car Act in 1890, requiring Blacks and Whites to sit separately. Plessy was to sit in the “whites only” car and refuse to sit in the “colored” car.
The railroad company was aware of their protest and supported it because the railroad company didn’t want to purchase new railroad cars. Therefore, on June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a train ticket in New Orleans and got into the “whites only” car on a train bound for Covington, Louisiana. According to the plan, the organization hired a private detective with the power of arrest to “arrest” Plessy. The train would then stop as per the plan so Plessy could be removed.
Plessy was brought to court, and despite his lawyers citing the 14th Amendment for denying Plessy his rights under the Equal Protection clause, he was ordered to pay a fine of $25 for refusing to move to the car designated for colored people. He then appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which affirmed the lower judge’s decision. The court referred to a number of cases in Northern states which ruled that segregation was constitutional, and even stating, from other courts, that segregation was “following the order of the Divine Providence,” and that the prejudice “is not created by law and probably cannot be changed by law.”
As a result, Plessy petitioned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case in 1896. Oral arguments were heard on April 13, 1896. Plessy and his defense again cited the 13th and 14th Amendments (the 13th Amendment ended slavery, while the 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection to all citizens and ensured the due process of law), argued that because Black men were still viewed as “property,” thus being inferior to Whites, and that segregation was unequal and violated the 14th Amendment. The main focus of the Supreme Court was, therefore, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Unfortunately, the court ruled that the Separate Car Act did not violate the Equal Protection Clause in a 7-1 decision (one justice did not vote as he had to attend to the death of his daughter), and sided with Ferguson, the original judge in Louisiana who ruled that he had to pay the fine. The court said that segregating white people from black people did not deny equal rights to black people and that as long as the facilities provided were equal, it would not be in violation of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court had effectively decided that racial segregation was constitutional. This decision is now known as the “Separate but Equal” doctrine and is arguably one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever made.
The lone dissenting justice, John Harlan, criticized the decision strongly, stating that “everyone knows that the statute in question (…) was to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons,” rather than the other way round. He also said that the statute was, “under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches.”
He also argued that, in a now well-known passage, that the Consitution was “color-blind,” and it could not “tolerate classes among citizens.” Here is the passage:
“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. 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. … In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
The prediction that the case would be as bad as the Dred Scott decision held true. This decision, along with the Dred Scott decision, is considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever.
The decision legalized racial segregation and resulted in Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Black people, virtually denying them all the rights they were guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, thus beginning a 58-year period of racial segregation. Under the Jim Crow law system, Blacks were treated as second-class citizens.
It took until 1954, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, for this decision to be reversed. And it took until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make segregation illegal in the U.S.
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