plessy v ferguson summary essay

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Plessy v. Ferguson

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 11, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between white people and Black people was not unconstitutional. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace.

Plessy v. Ferguson: Background and Context

After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction .

Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment , 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, and a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.

As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson , white and Black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for “Negro” or “colored” passengers.

Florida became the first state to mandate segregated railroad cars in 1887, followed in quick succession by Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and other states by the end of the century.

Black Resistance to Segregation

As Southern Black people witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the Black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance.

At the heart of the case that became Plessy v. Ferguson was a law passed in Louisiana in 1890 “providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races.” It stipulated that all passenger railways had to provide these separate cars, which should be equal in facilities.

Homer Adolph Plessy, who agreed to be the plaintiff in the case aimed at testing the law’s constitutionality, was of mixed race; he described himself as “seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood.”

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a ticket on a train from New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana, and took a vacant seat in a whites-only car. After refusing to leave the car at the conductor’s insistence, he was arrested and jailed.

Convicted by a New Orleans court of violating the 1890 law, Plessy filed a petition against the presiding judge, Hon. John H. Ferguson, claiming that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

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Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson

Over the next few years, segregation and Black disenfranchisement picked up pace in the South, and was more than tolerated by the North. Congress defeated a bill that would have given federal protection to elections in 1892, and nullified a number of Reconstruction laws on the books.

Then, on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson . In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights (like voting and jury service), not “social rights” (sitting in the railroad car of your choice).

In its ruling, the Court denied that segregated railroad cars for Black people were necessarily inferior. “We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy’s] argument,” Justice Henry Brown wrote, “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.”

John Marshall Harlan’s Dissent

Alone in the minority was Justice John Marshall Harlan , a former slaveholder from K entucky. Harlan had opposed emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves during the Reconstruction era—but changed his position due to his outrage over the actions of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan .

Harlan argued in his dissent that segregation ran counter to the constitutional principle of equality under the law: “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution,” he wrote. “It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.”

Plessy v. Ferguson Significance

The Plessy v. Ferguson verdict enshrined the doctrine of “separate but equal” as a constitutional justification for segregation, ensuring the survival of the Jim Crow South for the next half-century.

Intrastate railroads were among many segregated public facilities the verdict sanctioned; others included buses, hotels, theaters, swimming pools and schools. By the time of the 1899 case Cummings v. Board of Education , even Harlan appeared to agree that segregated public schools did not violate the Constitution.

It would not be until the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, at the dawn of the civil rights movement , that the majority of the Supreme Court would essentially concur with Harlan’s opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson ..

Writing the majority opinion in that 1954 case, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” in public education, calling segregated schools “inherently unequal,” and declaring that the plaintiffs in the Brown case were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

C. Vann Woodward, “ Plessy v. Ferguson : The Birth of Jim Crow,” American Heritage  (Volume 15, Issue 3: April 1964). Landmark Cases: Plessy v. Ferguson, PBS: The Supreme Court – The First Hundred Years . Louis Menand, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Limits of Law,” The New Yorker (February 12, 2001). Today in History – May 18: Plessy v. Ferguson , Library of Congress .

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Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. ferguson case brief.

The Committee of Citizens appealed the decision of Judge Ferguson to the Louisiana Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court Affirmed. The Committee of Citizens petitioned to United States Supreme Court on behalf of Plessy. The Court granted certiorari.

Affirmed. The Louisiana state law was deemed constitutional.

The state law should have been invalidated. Governmental bodies should not take into consideration the race of citizens when making legislative civil rights decisions regarding those citizens.  The underlying reason for a separate railway car is obviously a belief by the Louisiana legislature that African Americans are an inferior race. The Louisiana law and the majority misinterpret the civil rights protected in our color-blind constitution .

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The first amendment, supreme court case, plessy v. ferguson (1896).

163 U.S. 537 (1896)

“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

Selected by

Caroline Fredrickson

Visiting Professor, Georgetown University Law Center and Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice

Ilan Wurman

Associate Professor, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law segregating railroad cars within the state—separating African American passengers from white passengers.  This law was a symbol of the collapse of African American civil and political rights and the rise of Jim Crow laws throughout the South in the late 1800s.  Homer Plessy—an African American—challenged the law, arguing that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  However, the Supreme Court—in a 7-1 vote—upheld the Louisiana law, concluding that laws providing for “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans and white Americans were consistent with the Constitution.  Over a half a century later, the Supreme Court would finally overrule the infamous Plessy decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Read the Full Opinion

Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Justice Henry Billings Brown

The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.  Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.  The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced. . . .

So far, then, as a conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and, with respect to this, there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature.  In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order.  Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures. 

We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy’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.  The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position.  We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption.  The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured . . . except by an enforced commingling of the two races.  We cannot accept this proposition.  If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals. . . .

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. ...

Excerpt: Dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.  And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power.  So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.  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.  It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a State to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

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 .  It was adjudged in that case that the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country and sold as slaves were not included nor intended to be included under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and could not claim any of the rights and privileges which that instrument provided for and secured to citizens of the United States; that, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, they were ‘considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.’  The recent amendments of the Constitution, it was supposed, had eradicated these principles from our institutions.  But it seems that we have yet, in some of the States, a dominant race—a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race.  The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments to the Constitution . . . .

The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.  What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens.  That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana. 

The sure guarantee of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, National and State, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race.  State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat the legitimate results of the [Civil War] under the pretence of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible and to keep alive a conflict of races the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned. ...

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Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Citation: Plessy vs. Ferguson, Judgement, Decided May 18, 1896; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States; Record Group 267; Plessy v. Ferguson, 163, #15248, National Archives.

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The ruling in this Supreme Court case upheld a Louisiana state law that allowed for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races."

During the era of Reconstruction, Black Americans’ political rights were affirmed by three constitutional amendments and numerous laws passed by Congress. Racial discrimination was attacked on a particularly broad front by the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This legislation made it a crime for an individual to deny “the full and equal enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color.”

In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 act, ruling that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress authority to prevent discrimination by private individuals. Victims of racial discrimination were told to seek relief not from the federal government, but from the states. At the same time, state governments were passing legislation that codified inequality between the races. Laws requiring the establishment of separate schools for children of each race were most common; however, segregation was soon extended to most public and semi-public facilities through “Jim Crow” laws.

Beginning with passage of an 1887 Florida law, states began to require that railroads furnish separate accommodations for each race. These measures were unpopular with the railway companies that bore the expense of adding Jim Crow cars. Segregation of the railroads was even more objectionable to Black citizens, who saw it as a further step toward the total repudiation of three constitutional amendments. When such a bill was proposed before the Louisiana legislature in 1890, the Black community of New Orleans protested vigorously. Nonetheless, despite the presence of 16 Black legislators in the state assembly, the law was passed. It required either separate passenger coaches or partitioned coaches to provide segregated accommodations for each race. Passengers were required to sit in the appropriate areas or face a $25 fine or a 20-day jail sentence. Black nurses attending white children were permitted to ride in white compartments, however.

In 1891, a group of concerned young Black men of New Orleans formed the “Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law.” They raised money and engaged Albion W. Tourgée, a prominent Radical Republican author and politician, as their lawyer. On May 15, 1892, the Louisiana State Supreme Court decided in favor of the Pullman Company’s claim that the law was unconstitutional as it applied to interstate travel. Encouraged, the committee decided to press a test case on intrastate travel. With the cooperation of the East Louisiana Railroad, on June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a mulatto (7/8 white), seated himself in a white compartment, was challenged by the conductor, and was arrested and charged with violating the state law. In the Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans, Tourgée argued that the law requiring “separate but equal accommodations” was unconstitutional. When Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against him, Plessy applied to the State Supreme Court for a writ of prohibition and certiorari. Although the court upheld the state law, it granted Plessy’s petition for a writ of error that would enable him to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

In 1896, the Supreme Court issued its decision in  Plessy v. Ferguson . Justice Henry Brown of Michigan delivered the majority opinion, which sustained the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Jim Crow law. In part, he said:

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… The argument also assumes that social prejudice may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured except by an enforced commingling of the two races… If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

In the lone dissent, Kentuckian Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote:

I am of the opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberties of citizens, white and black, in that State, and hostile to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United States. If laws of like character should be enacted in the several States of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Slavery as an institution tolerated by law would, it is true, have disappeared from our country, but there would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights common to all citizens, upon the basis of race; and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the people of the United States, for whom and by whom, through representatives, our government is administrated. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Constitution to each State of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

It was not until the Supreme Court’s decision in  Brown v. Board of Education  and congressional civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s that systematic segregation under state law was ended. In the wake of those Federal actions, many states amended or rewrote their state constitutions to conform with the spirit of the 14th Amendment. For Homer Plessy, the remedies came too late.

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(Transcription of the Judgement of the Supreme Court of the United States in  Plessy v. Ferguson .)

Supreme Court of the United States, No. 210, October Term, 1895.

Homer Adolph Plessy, Plaintiff in Error, vs. J.H. Ferguson, Judge of Section "A" Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans

In Error to the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana

This cause came on to be heard on the transcript of the record from the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, and was argued by counsel.

On consideration whereof, It is now here ordered and adjudged by this Court that the judgement of the said Supreme Court, in this cause, be and the the same is hereby, affirmed with costs.

per Mr. Justice Brown, May 18, 1896.

Dissenting: Mr. Justice Harlan

(Transcription of Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in  Plessy v. Ferguson .)

U.S. Supreme Court PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

163 U.S. 537 PLESSY v. FERGUSON. No. 210.

May 18, 1896. This was a petition for writs of prohibition and certiorari originally filed in the supreme court of the state by Plessy, the plaintiff in error, against the Hon. John H. Ferguson, judge of the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, and setting forth, in substance, the following facts:

That petitioner was a citizen of the United States and a resident of the state of Louisiana, of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race by its constitution and laws; that on June 7, 1892, he engaged and paid for a first-class passage on the East Louisiana Railway, from New Orleans to Covington, in the same state, and thereupon entered a passenger train, and took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated; that such railroad company was incorporated by the laws of Louisiana as a common carrier, and was not authorized to distinguish between citizens according to their race, but, notwithstanding this, petitioner was required by the conductor, under penalty of ejection from said train and imprisonment, to vacate said coach, and occupy another seat, in a coach assigned by said company for persons not of the white race, and for no other reason than that petitioner was of the colored race; that, upon petitioner's refusal to comply with such order, he was, with the aid of a police officer, forcibly ejected from said coach, and hurried off to, and imprisoned in, the parish jail of New Orleans, and there held to answer a charge made by such officer to the effect that he was guilty of having criminally violated an act of the general assembly of the state, approved July 10, 1890, in such case made and provided.

The petitioner was subsequently brought before the recorder of the city for preliminary examination, and committed for trial to the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, where an information was filed against him in the matter above set forth, for a violation of the above act, which act the petitioner affirmed to be null and void, because in conflict with the constitution of the United States; that petitioner interposed a plea to such information, based upon the unconstitutionality of the act of the general assembly, to which the district attorney, on behalf of the state, filed a demurrer; that, upon issue being joined upon such demurrer and plea, the court sustained the demurrer, overruled the plea, and ordered petitioner to plead over to the facts set forth in the information, and that, unless the judge of the said court be enjoined by a writ of prohibition from further proceeding in such case, the court will proceed to fine and sentence petitioner to imprisonment, and thus deprive him of his constitutional rights set forth in his said plea, notwithstanding the unconstitutionality of the act under which he was being prosecuted; that no appeal lay from such sentence, and petitioner was without relief or remedy except by writs of prohibition and certiorari. Copies of the information and other proceedings in the criminal district court were annexed to the petition as an exhibit.

Upon the filing of this petition, an order was issued upon the respondent to show cause why a writ of prohibition should not issue, and be made perpetual, and a further order that the record of the proceedings had in the criminal cause be certified and transmitted to the supreme court.

To this order the respondent made answer, transmitting a certified copy of the proceedings, asserting the constitutionality of the law, and averring that, instead of pleading or admitting that he belonged to the colored race, the said Plessy declined and refused, either by pleading or otherwise, to admit that he was in any sense or in any proportion a colored man.

The case coming on for hearing before the supreme court, that court was of opinion that the law under which the prosecution was had was constitutional and denied the relief prayed for by the petitioner (Ex parte Plessy, 45 La. Ann. 80, 11 South. 948); whereupon petitioner prayed for a writ of error from this court, which was allowed by the chief justice of the supreme court of Louisiana.

Mr. Justice Harlan dissenting.

A. W. Tourgee and S. F. Phillips, for plaintiff in error.

Alex. Porter Morse, for defendant in error.

Mr. Justice BROWN, after stating the facts in the foregoing language, delivered the opinion of the court.

This case turns upon the constitutionality of an act of the general assembly of the state of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races. Acts 1890, No. 111, p. 152.

The first section of the statute enacts 'that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state, shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations: provided, that this section shall not be construed to apply to street railroads. No person or persons shall be permitted to occupy seats in coaches, other than the ones assigned to them, on account of the race they belong to.'

By the second section it was enacted 'that the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to which such passenger belongs; any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison, and any officer of any railroad insisting on assigning a passenger to a coach or compartment other than the one set aside for the race to which said passenger belongs, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison; and should any passenger refuse to occupy the coach or compartment to which he or she is assigned by the officer of such railway, said officer shall have power to refuse to carry such passenger on his train, and for such refusal neither he nor the railway company which he represents shall be liable for damages in any of the courts of this state.'

The third section provides penalties for the refusal or neglect of the officers, directors, conductors, and employees of railway companies to comply with the act, with a proviso that 'nothing in this act shall be construed as applying to nurses attending children of the other race.' The fourth section is immaterial.

The information filed in the criminal district court charged, in substance, that Plessy, being a passenger between two stations within the state of Louisiana, was assigned by officers of the company to the coach used for the race to which he belonged, but he insisted upon going into a coach used by the race to which he did not belong. Neither in the information nor plea was his particular race or color averred.

The petition for the writ of prohibition averred that petitioner was seven-eights Caucasian and one-eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him; and that he was entitled to every right, privilege, and immunity secured to citizens of the United States of the white race; and that, upon such theory, he took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated, and was ordered by the conductor to vacate said coach, and take a seat in another, assigned to persons of the colored race, and, having refused to comply with such demand, he was forcibly ejected, with the aid of a police officer, and imprisoned in the parish jail to answer a charge of having violated the above act.

The constitutionality of this act is attacked upon the ground that it conflicts both with the thirteenth amendment of the constitution, abolishing slavery, and the fourteenth amendment, which prohibits certain restrictive legislation on the part of the states.

1.  That it does not conflict with the thirteenth amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except a punishment for crime, is too clear for argument. Slavery implies involuntary servitude,-a state of bondage; the ownership of mankind as a chattel, or, at least, the control of the labor and services of one man for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of his own person, property, and services. This amendment was said in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, to have been intended primarily to abolish slavery, as it had been previously known in this country, and that it equally forbade Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie trade, when they amounted to slavery or involuntary servitude, and that the use of the word 'servitude' was intended to prohibit the use of all forms of involuntary slavery, of whatever class or name. It was intimated, however, in that case, that this amendment was regarded by the statesmen of that day as insufficient to protect the colored race from certain laws which had been enacted in the Southern states, imposing upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailing their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value; and that the fourteenth amendment was devised to meet this exigency.

So, too, in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 3 Sup. Ct. 18, it was said that the act of a mere individual, the owner of an inn, a public conveyance or place of amusement, refusing accommodations to colored people, cannot be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant, but only as involving an ordinary civil injury, properly cognizable by the laws of the state, and presumably subject to redress by those laws until the contrary appears. 'It would be running the slavery question into the ground,' said Mr. Justice Bradley, 'to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theater, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business.'

A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races-a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color-has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or re-establish a state of involuntary servitude. Indeed, we do not understand that the thirteenth amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in error in this connection.

2.  By the fourteenth amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are made citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside; and the states are forbidden from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The proper construction of this amendment was first called to the attention of this court in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, which involved, however, not a question of race, but one of exclusive privileges. The case did not call for any expression of opinion as to the exact rights it was intended to secure to the colored race, but it was said generally that its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro, to give definitions of citizenship of the United States and of the states, and to protect from the hostile legislation of the states the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, as distinguished from those of citizens of the states. The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguish d from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.

One of the earliest of these cases is that of Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Cush. 198, in which the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts held that the general school committee of Boston had power to make provision for the instruction of colored children in separate schools established exclusively for them, and to prohibit their attendance upon the other schools. 'The great principle,' said Chief Justice Shaw, 'advanced by the learned and eloquent advocate for the plaintiff [Mr. Charles Sumner], is that, by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons, without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law. ... But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment; but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the paternal consideration and protection of the law for their maintenance and security.' It was held that the powers of the committee extended to the establish- ment of separate schools for children of different ages, sexes and colors, and that they might also establish special schools for poor and neglected children, who have become too old to attend the primary school, and yet have not acquired the rudiments of learning, to enable them to enter the ordinary schools. Similar laws have been enacted by congress under its general power of legislation over the District of Columbia (sections 281- 283, 310, 319, Rev. St. D. C.), as well as by the legislatures of many of the states, and have been generally, if not uniformly, sustained by the courts. State v. McCann, 21 Ohio St. 210; Lehew v. Brummell (Mo. Sup.) 15 S. W. 765; Ward v. Flood, 48 Cal. 36; Bertonneau v. Directors of City Schools, 3 Woods, 177, Fed. Cas. No. 1,361; People v. Gallagher, 93 N. Y. 438; Cory v. Carter, 48 Ind. 337; Dawson v. Lee, 83 Ky. 49.

Laws forbidding the intermarriage of the two races may be said in a technical sense to interfere with the freedom of contract, and yet have been universally recognized as within the police power of the state. State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389.

The distinction between laws interfering with the political equality of the negro and those requiring the separation of the two races in schools, theaters, and railway carriages has been frequently drawn by this court. Thus, in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, it was held that a law of West Virginia limiting to white male persons 21 years of age, and citizens of the state, the right to sit upon juries, was a discrimination which implied a legal inferiority in civil society, which lessened the security of the right of the colored race, and was a step towards reducing them to a condition of servility. Indeed, the right of a colored man that, in the selection of jurors to pass upon his life, liberty, and property, there shall be no exclusion of his race, and no discrimination against them because of color, has been asserted in a number of cases. Virginia v. Rivers, 100 U.S. 313 ; Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370 ; ush v. Com., 107 U.S. 110 , 1 Sup. Ct. 625; Gibson v. Mississippi, 162 U.S. 565 , 16 Sup. Ct. 904. So, where the laws of a particular locality or the charter of a particular railway corporation has provided that no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color, we have held that this meant that persons of color should travel in the same car as white ones, and that the enactment was not satisfied by the company providing cars assigned exclusively to people of color, though they were as good as those which they assigned exclusively to white persons. Railroad Co. v. Brown, 17 Wall. 445.

Upon the other hand, where a statute of Louisiana required those engaged in the transportation of passengers among the states to give to all persons traveling within that state, upon vessels employed in that business, equal rights and privileges in all parts of the vessel, without distinction on account of race or color, and subjected to an action for damages the owner of such a vessel who excluded colored passengers on account of their color from the cabin set aside by him for the use of whites, it was held to be, so far as it applied to interstate commerce, unconstitutional and void. Hall v. De Cuir, 95 U.S. 485 . The court in this case, however, expressly disclaimed that it had anything whatever to do with the statute as a regulation of internal commerce, or affecting anything else than commerce among the states.

In the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 , 3 Sup. Ct. 18, it was held that an act of congress entitling all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances, on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement, and made applicable to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude, was unconstitutional and void, upon the ground that the fourteenth amendment was prohibitory upon the states only, and the legislation authorized to be adopted by congress for enforcing it was not direct legislation on matters respecting which the states were prohibited from making or enforcing certain laws, or doing certain acts, but was corrective legislation, such as might be necessary or proper for counter-acting and redressing the effect of such laws or acts. In delivering the opinion of the court, Mr. Justice Bradley observed that the fourteenth amendment 'does not invest congress with power to legislate upon subjects that are within the domain of state legislation, but to provide modes of relief against state legislation or state action of the kind referred to. It does not authorize congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights, but to provide modes of redress against the operation of state laws, and the action of state officers, executive or judicial, when these are subversive of the fundamental rights specified in the amendment. Positive rights and privileges are undoubtedly secured by the fourteenth amendment; but they are secured by way of prohibition against state laws and state proceedings affecting those rights and privileges, and by power given to congress to legislate for the purpose of carrying such prohibition into effect; and such legislation must necessarily be predicated upon such supposed state laws or state proceedings, and be directed to the correction of their operation and effect.'

Much nearer, and, indeed, almost directly in point, is the case of the Louisville, N. O. & T. Ry. Co. v. State, 133 U.S. 587 , 10 Sup. Ct. 348, wherein the railway company was indicted for a violation of a statute of Mississippi, enacting that all railroads carrying passengers should provide equal, but separate, accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger cars for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger cars by a partition, so as to secure separate accommodations. The case was presented in a different aspe t from the one under consideration, inasmuch as it was an indictment against the railway company for failing to provide the separate accommodations, but the question considered was the constitutionality of the law. In that case, the supreme court of Mississippi (66 Miss. 662, 6 South. 203) had held that the statute applied solely to commerce within the state, and, that being the construction of the state statute by its highest court, was accepted as conclusive. 'If it be a matter,' said the court (page 591, 133 U. S., and page 348, 10 Sup. Ct.), 'respecting commerce wholly within a state, and not interfering with commerce between the states, then, obviously, there is no violation of the commerce clause of the federal constitution. ... No question arises under this section as to the power of the state to separate in different compartments interstate pas- sengers, or affect, in any manner, the privileges and rights of such passengers. All that we can consider is whether the state has the power to require that railroad trains within her limits shall have separate accommodations for the two races. That affecting only commerce within the state is no invasion of the power given to congress by the commerce clause.'

A like course of reasoning applies to the case under consideration, since the supreme court of Louisiana, in the case of State v. Judge, 44 La. Ann. 770, 11 South. 74, held that the statute in question did not apply to interstate passengers, but was confined in its application to passengers traveling exclusively within the borders of the state. The case was decided largely upon the authority of Louisville, N. O. & T. Ry. Co. v. State, 66 Miss. 662, 6 South, 203, and affirmed by this court in 133 U.S. 587 , 10 Sup. Ct. 348. In the present case no question of interference with interstate commerce can possibly arise, since the East Louisiana Railway appears to have been purely a local line, with both its termini within the state of Louisiana. Similar statutes for the separation of the two races upon public conveyances were held to be constitutional in Railroad v. Miles, 55 Pa. St. 209; Day v. Owen 5 Mich. 520; Railway Co. v. Williams, 55 Ill. 185; Railroad Co. v. Wells, 85 Tenn. 613; 4 S. W. 5; Railroad Co. v. Benson, 85 Tenn. 627, 4 S. W. 5; The Sue, 22 Fed. 843; Logwood v. Railroad Co., 23 Fed. 318; McGuinn v. Forbes, 37 Fed. 639; People v. King ( N. Y. App.) 18 N. E. 245; Houck v. Railway Co., 38 Fed. 226; Heard v. Railroad Co., 3 Inter St. Commerce Com. R. 111, 1 Inter St. Commerce Com. R. 428.

While we think the enforced separation of the races, as applied to the internal commerce of the state, neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment, we are not prepared to say that the conductor, in assigning passengers to the coaches according to their race, does not act at his peril, or that the provision of the second section of the act that denies to the passenger compensation in damages for a refusal to receive him into the coach in which he properly belongs is a valid exercise of the legislative power. Indeed, we understand it to be conceded by the state's attorney that such part of the act as exempts from liability the railway company and its officers is unconstitutional. The power to assign to a particular coach obviously implies the power to determine to which race the passenger belongs, as well as the power to determine who, under the laws of the particular state, is to be deemed a white, and who a colored, person. This question, though indicated in the brief of the plaintiff in error, does not properly arise upon the record in this case, since the only issue made is as to the unconstitutionality of the act, so far as it requires the railway to provide separate accommodations, and the conductor to assign passengers according to their race.

It is claimed by the plaintiff in error that, in an mixed community, the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is 'property,' in the same sense that a right of action or of inheritance is property. Conceding this to be so, for the purposes of this case, we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man, and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so-called 'property.' Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man, and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.

In this connection, it is also suggested by the learned counsel for the plaintiff in error that the same argument that will justify the state legislature in requiring railways to provide separate accommodations for the two races will also authorize them to require separate cars to be provided for people whose hair is of a certain color, or who are aliens, or who belong to certain nationalities, or to enact laws requiring colored people to walk upon one side of the street, and white people upon the other, or requiring white men's houses to be painted white, and colored men's black, or their vehicles or business signs to be of different colors, upon the theory that one side of the street is as good as the other, or that a house or vehicle of one color is as good as one of another color. The reply to all this is that every exercise of the police power must be reasonable, and extend only to such laws as are enacted in good faith for the promotion of the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular class. Thus, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 , 6 Sup. Ct. 1064, it was held by this court that a municipal ordinance of the city of San Francisco, to regulate the carrying on of public laundries within the limits of the municipality, violated the provisions of the constitution of the United States, if it conferred upon the municipal authorities arbitrary power, at their own will, and without regard to discretion, in the legal sense of the term, to give or withhold consent as to persons or places, without regard to the competency of the persons applying or the propriety of the places selected for the carrying on of the business. It was held to be a covert attempt on the part of the municipality to make an arbitrary and unjust discrimination against the Chinese race. While this was the case of a municipal ordinance, a like principle has been held to apply to acts of a state legislature passed in the exercise of the police power. Railroad Co. v. Husen, 95 U.S. 465 ; Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Kentucky, 161 U.S. 677 , 16 Sup. Ct. 714, and cases cited on page 700, 161 U. S., and page 714, 16 Sup. Ct.; Daggett v. Hudson, 43 Ohio St. 548, 3 N. E. 538; Capen v. Foster, 12 Pick. 485; State v. Baker, 38 Wis. 71; Monroe v. Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665; Hulseman v. Rems, 41 Pa. St. 396; Osman v. Riley, 15 Cal. 48.

So far, then, as a conflict with the fourteenth amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and with respect to this there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature. In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order. Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the fourteenth amendment than the acts of congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.

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. The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case, and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption. The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals. As was said by the court of appeals of New York in People v. Gallagher, 93 N. Y. 438, 448: 'This end can neither be accomplished nor promoted by laws which conflict with the general sentiment of the community upon whom they are designed to operate. When the government, therefore, has secured to each of its citizens equal rights before the law, and equal opportunities for improvement and progress, it has accomplished the end for which it was organized, and performed all of the functions respecting social advantages with which it is endowed.' Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

It is true that the question of the proportion of colored blood necessary to constitute a colored person, as distinguished from a white person, is one upon which there is a difference of opinion in the different states; some holding that any visible admixture of black blood stamps the person as belonging to the colored race (State v. Chavers, 5 Jones [N. C.] 1); others, that it depends upon the preponderance of blood ( Gray v. State, 4 Ohio, 354; Monroe v. Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665); and still others, that the predominance of white blood must only be in the proportion of three-fourths (People v. Dean, 14 Mich. 406; Jones v. Com., 80 Va. 544). But these are questions to be determined under the laws of each state, and are not properly put in issue in this case. Under the allegations of his petition, it may undoubtedly become a question of importance whether, under the laws of Louisiana, the petitioner belongs to the white or colored race.

The judgment of the court below is therefore affirmed.

Mr. Justice BREWER did not hear the argument or participate in the decision of this case.

Mr. Justice HARLAN dissenting.

By the Louisiana statute the validity of which is here involved, all railway companies (other than street-railroad companies) carry passengers in that state are required to have separate but equal accommodations for white and colored persons, 'by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations.' Under this statute, no colored person is permitted to occupy a seat in a coach assigned to white persons; nor any white person to occupy a seat in a coach assigned to colored persons. The managers of the railroad are not allowed to exercise any discretion in the premises, but are required to assign each passenger to some coach or compartment set apart for the exclusive use of is race. If a passenger insists upon going into a coach or compartment not set apart for persons of his race, he is subject to be fined, or to be imprisoned in the parish jail. Penalties are prescribed for the refusal or neglect of the officers, directors, conductors, and employees of railroad companies to comply with the provisions of the act.

Only 'nurses attending children of the other race' are excepted from the operation of the statute. No exception is made of colored attendants traveling with adults. A white man is not permitted to have his colored servant with him in the same coach, even if his condition of health requires the constant personal assistance of such servant. If a colored maid insists upon riding in the same coach with a white woman whom she has been employed to serve, and who may need her personal attention while traveling, she is subject to be fined or imprisoned for such an exhibition of zeal in the discharge of duty.

While there may be in Louisiana persons of different races who are not citizens of the United States, the words in the act 'white and colored races' necessarily include all citizens of the United States of both races residing in that state. So that we have before us a state enactment that compels, under penalties, the separation of the two races in railroad passenger coaches, and makes it a crime for a citizen of either race to enter a coach that has been assigned to citizens of the other race.

Thus, the state regulates the use of a public highway by citizens of the United States solely upon the basis of race.

However apparent the injustice of such legislation may be, we have only to consider whether it is consistent with the constitution of the United States.

That a railroad is a public highway, and that the corporation which owns or operates it is in the exercise of public functions, is not, at this day, to be disputed. Mr. Justice Nelson, speaking for this court in New Jersey Steam Nav. Co. v. Merchants' Bank, 6 How. 344, 382, said that a common carrier was in the exercise 'of a sort of public office, and has public duties to perform, from which he should not be permitted to exonerate himself without the assent of the parties concerned.' Mr. Justice Strong, delivering the judgment of this court in Olcott v. Supervisors, 16 Wall. 678, 694, said: 'That railroads, though constructed by private corporations, and owned by them, are public highways, has been the doctrine of nearly all the courts ever since such conveniences for passage and transportation have had any existence. Very early the question arose whether a state's right of eminent domain could be exercised by a private corporation created for the purpose of constructing a railroad. Clearly, it could not, unless taking land for such a purpose by such an agency is taking land for public use. The right of eminent domain nowhere justifies taking property for a private use. Yet it is a doctrine universally accepted that a state legislature may authorize a private corporation to take land for the construction of such a road, making compensation to the owner. What else does this doctrine mean if not that building a railroad, though it be built by a private corporation, is an act done for a public use?' So, in Township of Pine Grove v. Talcott, 19 Wall. 666, 676: 'Though the corporation [a railroad company] was private, its work was public, as much so as if it were to be constructed by the state.' So, in Inhabitants of Worcester v. Western R. Corp., 4 Metc. (Mass.) 564: 'The establishment of that great thoroughfare is regarded as a public work, established by public authority, intended for the public use and benefit, the use of which is secured to the whole community, and constitutes, therefore, like a canal, turnpike, or highway, a public easement.' 'It is true that the real and personal property, necessary to the establishment and management of the railroad, is vested in the corporation; but it is in trust for the public.'

In respect of civil rights, common to all citizens, the constitution of the United States does not, I think, permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights. Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances, when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. But I deny that any legislative body or judicial tribunal may have regard to the race of citizens when the civil rights of those citizens are involved. Indeed, such legislation as that here in question is inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, national and state, but with the personal liberty enjoyed by every one within the United States.

The thirteenth amendment does not permit the withholding or the deprivation of any right necessarily inhering in freedom. It not only struck down the institution of slavery as previously existing in the United States, but it prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude. It decreed universal civil freedom in this country. This court has so adjudged. But, that amendment having been found inadequate to the protection of the rights of those who had been in slavery, it was followed by the fourteenth amendment, which added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship, and to the security of personal liberty, by declaring that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,' and that 'no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' These two amendments, if enforced according to their true intent and meaning, will protect all the civil rights that pertain to freedom and citizenship. Finally, and to the end that no citizen should be denied, on account of his race, the privilege of participating in the political control of his country, it was declared by the fifteenth amendment that 'the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.'

These notable additions to the fundamental law were welcomed by the friends of liberty throughout the world. They removed the race line from our governmental systems. They had, as this court has said, a common purpose, namely, to secure 'to a race recently emancipated, a race that through many generations have been held in slavery, all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy.' They declared, in legal effect, this court has further said, 'that the law in the states shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the states; and in regard to the colored race, for whose protection the amendment was primarily designed, that no discrimination shall be made against them by law because of their color.' We also said: 'The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity or right, most valuable to the colored race,-the right to exemption from unfriendly legislation against them distinctively as colored; exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the security of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy; and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them to the condition of a subject race.' It was, consequently, adjudged that a state law that excluded citizens of the colored race from juries, because of their race, however well qualified in other respects to discharge the duties of jurymen, was repugnant to the fourteenth amendment. Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 306 , 307 S.; Virginia v. Rives, Id. 313; Ex parte Virginia, Id. 339; Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370 , 386; Bush v. Com., 107 U.S. 110, 116 , 1 S. Sup. Ct. 625. At the present term, referring to the previous adjudications, this court declared that 'underlying all of those decisions is the principle that the constitution of the United States, in its present form, forbids, so far as civil and political rights are concerned, discrimination by the general government or the states against any citizen because of his race. All citizens are equal before the law.' Gibson v. State, 162 U.S. 565 , 16 Sup. Ct. 904.

The decisions referred to show the scope of the recent amendments of the constitution. They also show that it is not within the power of a state to prohibit colored citizens, because of their race, from participating as jurors in the administration of justice.

It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race, but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. But this argument does not meet the difficulty. Every one knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons. Railroad corporations of Louisiana did not make discrimination among whites in the matter of accommodation for travelers. The thing to accomplish 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. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. The fundamental objection, therefore, to the statute, is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens. 'Personal liberty,' it has been well said, 'consists in the power of locomotion, of changing situation, or removing one's person to whatsoever places one's own inclination may direct, without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law.' 1 Bl. Comm. *134. If a white man and a black man choose to occupy the same public conveyance on a public highway, it is their right to do so; and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each.

It is one thing for railroad carriers to furnish, or to be required by law to furnish, equal accommodations for all whom they are under a legal duty to carry. It is quite another thing for government to forbid citizens of the white and black races from traveling in the same public conveyance, and to punish officers of railroad companies for permitting persons of the two races to occupy the same passenger coach. If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street? Why may it not require sheriffs to assign whites to one side of a court room, and blacks to the other? And why may it not also prohibit the commingling of the two races in the galleries of legislative halls or in public assemblages convened for the consideration of the political questions of the day? Further, if this statute of Louisiana is consistent with the personal liberty of citizens, why may not the state require the separation in railroad coaches of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?

The answer given at the argument to these questions was that regulations of the kind they suggest would be unreasonable, and could not, therefore, stand before the la . Is it meant that the determination of questions of legislative power depends upon the inquiry whether the statute whose validity is questioned is, in the judgment of the courts, a reasonable one, taking all the circumstances into consideration? A statute may be unreasonable merely because a sound public policy forbade its enactment. But I do not understand that the courts have anything to do with the policy or expediency of legislation. A statute may be valid, and yet, upon grounds of public policy, may well be characterized as unreasonable. Mr. Sedgwick correctly states the rule when he says that, the legislative intention being clearly ascertained, 'the courts have no other duty to perform than to execute the legislative will, without any regard to their views as to the wisdom or justice of the particular enactment.' Sedg. St. & Const. Law, 324. There is a dangerous tendency in these latter days to enlarge the functions of the courts, by means of judicial interference with the will of the people as expressed by the legislature. Our institutions have the distinguishing characteristic that the three departments of government are co-ordinate and separate. Each much keep within the limits defined by the constitution. And the courts best discharge their duty by executing the will of the law-making power, constitutionally expressed, leaving the results of legislation to be dealt with by the people through their representatives. Statutes must always have a reasonable construction. Sometimes they are to be construed strictly, sometimes literally, in order to carry out the legislative will. But, however construed, the intent of the legislature is to be respected if the particular statute in question is valid, although the courts, looking at the public interests, may conceive the statute to be both unreasonable and impolitic. If the power exists to enact a statute, that ends the matter so far as the courts are concerned. The adjudged cases in which statutes have been held to be void, because unreasonable, are those in which the means employed by the legislature were not at all germane to the end to which the legislature was competent.

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. 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 guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

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.

It was adjudged in that case that the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, were not included nor intended to be included under the word 'citizens' in the constitution, and could not claim any of the rights and privileges which that instrument provided for and secured to citizens of the United States; that, at time of the adoption of the constitution, they were 'considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.' 17 How. 393, 404. The recent amendments of the constitution, it was supposed, had eradicated these principles from our institutions. But it seems that we have yet, in some of the states, a dominant race,-a superior class of citizens,-which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race. The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the constitution, by one of which the blacks of this country were made citizens of the United States and of the states in which they respectively reside, and whose privileges and immunities, as citizens, the states are forbidden to abridge. Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana.

The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned. This question is not met by the suggestion that social equality cannot exist between the white and black races in this country. That argument, if it can be properly regarded as one, is scarcely worthy of consideration; for social equality no more exists between two races when traveling in a passenger coach or a public highway than when members of the same races sit by each other in a street car or in the jury box, or stand or sit with each other in a political assembly, or when they use in common the streets of a city or town, or when they are in the same room for the purpose of having their names placed on the registry of voters, or when they approach the ballot box in order to exercise the high privilege of voting.

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, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. It is scarcely just to say that a colored citizen should not object to occupying a public coach assigned to his own race. He does not object, nor, perhaps, would he object to separate coaches for his race if his rights under the law were recognized. But he does object, and he ought never to cease objecting, that citizens of the white and black races can be adjudged criminals because they sit, or claim the right to sit, in the same public coach on a public highway. The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.

If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens,-our equals before the law. The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

The result of the whole matter is that while this court has frequently adjudged, and at the present term has recognized the doctrine, that a state cannot, consistently with the constitution of the United States, prevent white and black citizens, having the required qualifications for jury service, from sitting in the same jury box, it is now solemnly held that a state may prohibit white and black citizens from sitting in the same passenger coach on a public highway, or may require that they be separated by a 'partition' when in the same passenger coach. May it not now be reasonably expected that astute men of the dominant race, who affect to be disturbed at the possibility that the integrity of the white race may be corrupted, or that its supremacy will be imperiled, by contact on public highways with black people, will endeavor to procure statutes requiring white and black jurors to be separated in the jury box by a 'partition,' and that, upon retiring from the court room to consult as to their verdict, such partition, if it be a movable one, shall be taken to their consultation room, and set up in such way as to prevent black jurors from coming too close to their brother jurors of the white race. If the 'partition' used in the court room happens to be stationary, provision could be made for screens with openings through which jurors of the two races could confer as to their verdict without coming into personal contact with each other. I cannot see but that, according to the principles this day announced, such state legislation, although conceived in hostility to, and enacted for the purpose of humiliating, citizens of the United States of a particular race, would be held to be consistent with the constitution.

I do not deem it necessary to review the decisions of state courts to which reference was made in argument. Some, and the most important, of them, are wholly inapplicable, because rendered prior to the adoption of the last amendments of the constitution, when colored people had very few rights which the dominant race felt obliged to respect. Others were made at a time when public opinion, in many localities, was dominated by the institution of slavery; when it would not have been safe to do justice to the black man; and when, so far as the rights of blacks were concerned, race prejudice was, practically, the supreme law of the land. Those decisions cannot be guides in the era introduced by the recent amendments of the supreme law, which established universal civil freedom, gave citizenship to all born or naturalized in the United States, and residing ere, obliterated the race line from our systems of governments, national and state, and placed our free institutions upon the broad and sure foundation of the equality of all men before the law.

I am of opinion that the state of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state, and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the constitution of the United States. If laws of like character should be enacted in the several states of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Slavery, as an institution tolerated by law, would, it is true, have disappeared from our country; but there would remain a power in the states, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the full enjoyment of the blessings of freedom, to regulate civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race, and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the 'People of the United States,' for whom, and by whom through representatives, our government is administered. Such a system is inconsistent with the guaranty given by the constitution to each state of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

For the reason stated, I am constrained to withhold my assent from the opinion and judgment of the majority.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Landmark 1896 Supreme Court Case Legitimized Jim Crow Laws

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The 1896 landmark Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson established that the policy of “separate but equal” was legal and states could pass laws requiring segregation of the races.

By declaring that  Jim Crow laws  were constitutional, the nation’s highest court created an atmosphere of legalized discrimination that endured for nearly six decades. Segregation became common in public facilities including railroad cars, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and even restrooms and drinking fountains.

It would not be until the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and actions taken during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, that the oppressive legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson passed into history.

Fast Facts: Plessy v. Ferguson

Case Argued : April 13, 1896

Decision Issued:  May 18, 1896

Petitioner: Homer Adolph Plessy

Respondent: John Ferguson

Key Questions: Did Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, which required separate railway cars for Black and White people, violate the Fourteenth Amendment?

Majority Decision: Justices Fuller, Field, Gray, Brown, Shiras, White, and Peckham

Dissenting : Justice Harlan

Ruling: The court held that equal but separate accommodations for White and Black people did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

On June 7, 1892 a New Orleans shoemaker, Homer Plessy, bought a railroad ticket and sat in a car designated for White people only. Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, was working with an advocacy group intent on testing the law for the purpose of bringing a court case.

While sitting in the car, Plessy was asked if he was "colored." He replied that he was. He was told to move to a train car for Black people only. Plessy refused. He was arrested and released on bail the same day. Plessy was later put on trial in a court in New Orleans.

Plessy’s violation of the local law was actually a challenge to a national trend toward laws separating the races. Following the  Civil War , three amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, seemed to promote racial equality. However, the so-called Reconstruction Amendments were ignored as many states, particularly in the South, passed laws that mandated segregation of the races.

Louisiana, in 1890, had passed a law, known as the Separate Car Act, requiring “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on the railroads within the state. A committee of New Orleans citizens of color decided to challenge the law.

After Homer Plessy was arrested, a local attorney defended him, claiming that the law violated the 13th and 14th Amendments. The local judge, John H. Ferguson, overruled Plessy's position that the law was unconstitutional. Judge Ferguson found him guilty of the local law.

After Plessy lost his initial court case, his appeal made it to the US Supreme Court. The Court ruled 7-1 that the Louisiana law requiring that the races be separated did not violate the 13th or 14th amendments to the  Constitution  as long as the facilities were deemed equal.

Two remarkable characters played major roles in the case: attorney and activist Albion Winegar Tourgée, who argued Plessy’s case, and Justice John Marshall Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was the sole dissenter from the court’s decision.

Activist and Attorney, Albion W. Tourgée

An attorney who came to New Orleans to help Plessy, Albion W. Tourgée, was widely known as an activist for civil rights. An immigrant from France, he had fought in the Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861.

After the war, Tourgée became a lawyer and served for a time as a judge in the Reconstruction government of North Carolina. A writer as well as an attorney, Tourgée wrote a novel about life in the South after the war. He also was involved in a number of publishing ventures and activities focused on attaining equal status under the law for African Americans.

Tourgée was able to appeal Plessy's case first to the supreme court of Louisiana, and then ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. After a four-year delay, Tourgée argued the case in Washington on April 13, 1896.

A month later, on May 18, 1896, the court ruled 7-1 against Plessy. One justice did not participate, and the sole dissenting voice was Justice John Marshall Harlan.

Justice John Marshall Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court

Justice Harlan had been born in Kentucky in 1833 and grew up in a family of enslavers. He served as a Union officer in the Civil War, and following the war, he became involved in politics, aligned with the Republican Party . He was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

On the highest court, Harlan developed a reputation for dissenting. He believed the races should be treated equally before the law. And his dissent in the Plessy case could be considered his masterpiece in reasoning against the prevailing racial attitudes of his era.

One particular line in his dissent was quoted often in the 20th century: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

In his dissent, Harlan also wrote: 

"The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It can-not be justified upon any legal grounds."

The day after the decision was announced, May 19, 1896, The New York Times published a brief article about the case consisting of only two paragraphs. The second paragraph was devoted to Harlan's dissent:

"Mr. Justice Harlan announced a very vigorous dissent, saying that he saw nothing but mischief in all such laws. In his view of the case, no power in the land had the right to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. It would be just as reasonable and proper, he said, for States to pass laws requiring separate cars to be furnished for Catholics and Protestants, or for descendants of the Teutonic race and those of the Latin race."

While the decision had far-reaching implications, it was not considered especially newsworthy when it was announced in May 1896. Newspapers of the day tended to bury the story, printing only very brief mentions of the decision.

It is possible such scant attention was paid to the decision at the time because the Supreme Court's ruling reinforced attitudes that were already widespread. But if the Plessy v. Ferguson did not create major headlines at the time, it was certainly felt by millions of Americans for decades. 

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Plessy v. Ferguson: Primary Documents in American History

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On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that separate-but-equal facilities were constitutional. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the principle of racial segregation over the next half-century. The ruling provided legal justification for segregation on trains and buses, and in public facilities such as hotels, theaters, and schools. The impact of Plessy was to relegate African Americans to second-class citizenship. The Supreme Court overruled the Plessy decision in Brown v. the Board of Education on May 17, 1954.

• U.S. Reports: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

Russell Lee, photographer. Negro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma . 1939. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Supreme Court of the United States. Plessy v. Ferguson . New York: Banks & Brothers Law Publishing, 1896. Library of Congress Law Library.

Jack Delano, photographer. At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina . 1940. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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(1896) the plessy v. ferguson decision.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was the seminal post-Reconstruction Supreme Court decision that judicially validated state sponsored segregation in public facilities by its creation and endorsement of the “separate but equal” doctrine as satisfying the Constitutional requirements provided in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision was 7-1 with one abstention by Justice John Marshall Harlen, whose lone dissent earned him the nickname, “the Great Dissenter.”  It wasn’t until Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that this “separate but equal” doctrine was abolished.

Homer Plessy was born a free man and, going by the American South’s prevailing “one drop rule,” described as an “octoroon” (i.e., one-eighth black). Legally classified as black, Plessy boarded a “whites-only” car on the East Louisiana Railroad. Segregated rail cars were allowed due to an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating separate railroad accommodations for whites and blacks, which included separate railway cars. The advancement of the railroads brought the first attempt at state segregation laws, although there was some resistance to this because of the interstate commerce nature of railroads. The East Louisiana railroad, however, ran exclusively within the state borders of Louisiana, allowing the state’s segregation law to apply unconditionally. When Plessy refused a request to take a seat in the “colored only” section, he was removed, arrested, charged, and ultimately convicted. The circumstance was planned as a test case by the Committee of Citizens, a local New Orleans group of people of color. The railroad was pre-advised of Plessy’s race status. Notably, the facilities were, contrary to many public facilities, comparable in quality for both races.

Plessey’s conviction was sustained through the state courts and ultimately found its way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy argued the statute violated both the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, contending that the reputation of being white was a form of “property” and that the state, by declaring Homer Plessy non-white, denied his property rights and implied the inferiority of the Negro race.

The majority of the Court rejected the view that the Louisiana law implied any inferiority of blacks. Instead, it contended that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy. Justice Brown wrote, “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.”

The Plessy decision legitimized segregation practices begun earlier in the South and provided a legal framework for additional segregation laws throughout the rest of the nation. As a consequence of the Plessy decision, many of the rights blacks won at both the state and federal level during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the “separate but equal” doctrine. Despite the Supreme Court’s faith in “separate but equal,” Southern state governments refused to provide blacks with genuinely equal facilities and resources in the decades following the Plessy decision.

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Source of the author's information:.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); James C. Cobb, “Segregating the New South:  The Origins and Legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson,” 12 Georgia State University Law Review 1017 (1995-6), 1019.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Primary tabs.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)  is the Supreme Court case that had originally upheld the constitutionality of “ separate, but equal  facilities” based on race. It was subsequently since overturned by  Brown v. Board of Education (1954) .

Louisiana had adopted a law in 1890 that required railroad companies to provide racially segregated accommodations. In 1892, the state of Louisiana prosecuted Homer Plessy, a man who was 7/8 Caucasian and 1/8 Black, for refusing to leave a passenger car designated for whites .

The Supreme Court , in an opinion written by Justice Brown, upheld the Louisiana law, reasoning that the  Fourteenth Amendment  of the Constitution was designated to enforce the political equality of blacks and whites but not intended to abolish social inequality. Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment did not encompass segregation, and states could permissibly exercise their police power to enforce segregation as a matter of public policy . The Court also held that the state statute itself was not based on an assumption of black inferiority, nor did it stigmatize blacks with second-class status; rather, “the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Justice Harlan’s sole dissent stated that the law implicated civil , not just political, inequality. He noted that the law was intended not to exclude whites from railroad cars carrying blacks , but to exclude blacks from railroad cars carrying whites . Justice Harlan wrote: “While there may be in Louisiana persons of different races who are not citizens of the United States, the words in the act ‘white and colored races’ necessarily include all citizens of the United States of both races residing in that State. So that we have before us a state enactment that compels, under penalties, the separation of the two races in railroad passenger coaches, and makes it a crime for a citizen of either race to enter a coach that has been assigned to citizens of the other race.

Thus, the State regulates the use of a public highway by citizens of the United States solely upon the basis of race.

However apparent the injustice of such legislation may be, we have only to consider whether it is consistent with the Constitution of the United States.” … “In view of the Constitution, in the eyes 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. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a State to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.”

See: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

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Video transcript

Plessy v. Ferguson

Written by: julie silverbrook, icivics, by the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how various factors contributed to continuity and change in the “New South” from 1877 to 1898

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative with the Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching Narrative and the Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law,” 1893 Primary Source to have students discuss the issues that African Americans faced after Reconstruction and through the beginning of the twentieth century.

It was not until after the U.S. Supreme Court’s now infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, upholding an 1890 railroad segregation statute in Louisiana and finding that separate accommodations for the races nevertheless could be equal, that segregation laws spread throughout the United States. After the decision, state legislatures enacted segregation statutes that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, virtually all forms of public transportation, and sports and recreation. It is commonly believed that racial segregation had been the status quo in the South since the time of slavery, but as W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out, a rigid segregation code could not exist under slavery because the races were in close proximity much of the time. Instead, it was a horrific invention of the later nineteenth century.

Louisiana, and especially New Orleans with its Spanish and French background and sizable population of free blacks of wealth and stature, had permitted the most free intermingling between the races of any state in the South. It is not surprising, therefore, that when a bill requiring segregation on railroad cars was introduced into the Louisiana state legislature in 1890, there was vigorous opposition to it. However, the bill was passed.

The black community members who had protested the legislation went on to form the Citizens Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law and collected money to bring a test case. Albion W. Tourgée, an upstate New York lawyer who was one of the founders of the biracial Citizens Equal Rights League, supported this citizens’ group. Tourgée offered to direct the case without fee and was named lead counsel. James C. Walker, a white criminal lawyer in New Orleans, was brought on as local counsel in the case.

In seeking a test case for the law, Tourgée insisted on a plaintiff who was “nearly white.” Homer Plessy, the chosen plaintiff, was “seven-eighths” white and presented as a white man, though in Louisiana, he was considered legally black. On June 7, 1892, Plessy boarded a passenger train with a first-class ticket to a destination within Louisiana. He sat in a railroad car reserved for whites and refused to move to the car reserved for “Negroes” when asked to do so. Plessy was arrested and imprisoned in county jail. He was tried in the criminal district court of New Orleans in November 1892 and convicted, over the objections of his attorney, who argued that the Louisiana statute violated the federal Constitution. Plessy’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, arguing that the statute violated both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Louisiana Supreme Court denied both claims, and Plessy’s team then appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.

The opposing sides presented oral argument starting April 13, 1896. The Supreme Court’s decision came on May 18, 1896, nearly four years after Plessy’s arrest. Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the Court, upheld the validity of the Louisiana statute, with only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissenting.

The issue facing the Court in Plessy was whether a Louisiana statute providing for equal but separate railway accommodations for white and black passengers violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court treated each constitutional question separately.

The majority opinion dismissed Plessy’s claim that the Louisiana statute violated the Thirteenth Amendment, holding that the statute did not impose a badge of slavery on the plaintiff. The Court found that a “statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races . . . has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude.”

On the Fourteenth Amendment question, the majority conceded that the object of the Amendment was to enforce “political” equality of the races “before the law.” But the Court then advanced two sweeping propositions. First, it said that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” Second, the Court argued that laws requiring segregation of the two races did not necessarily imply inferiority of either.

Expanding on the latter point, Justice Brown found “the underlying fallacy” of the plaintiff’s argument consisted “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.”

The Court also found that although the Fourteenth Amendment granted civil and political equality, it did not secure “social equality.” The Court held that the Louisiana law was a reasonable regulation and that it was within the discretion of the state legislature to “preserv[e] . . . the public peace and good order.” He went on,

Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.

The Court then turned the question of due process. This was the reason Tourgée had selected a “nearly white” plaintiff for his test case. His brief argued that the reputation of being white was a property of great pecuniary value, “the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity.” From this premise, Tourgée argued that the Louisiana statute authorizing the railroad officials “to assign a person to a car set aside for a particular race” deprived the passenger of his property without due process of law. The Court responded to this argument by finding that “we are unable to see how this statute deprives [Plessy] of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so-called property. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.”

In his dissent Justice Harlan pointed out the results of the Court’s decision:

What can more certainly arouse race hate, what can more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which in fact proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?

Harlan believed the Louisiana statute was “inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, National and States, but with the personal liberty enjoyed by everyone within the United States.”

Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan was the lone dissenter in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case.

Harlan also reiterated his belief that the Thirteenth Amendment “not only struck down the institution of slavery as previously existed in the United States, but it prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude. It decreed universal civil freedom in this country.” He went on to famously write:

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. 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.

In response to the majority’s dismissal of the Fourteenth Amendment argument, Harlan argued the statute was clearly aimed at discriminating only against blacks. For Harlan, the black citizens in New Orleans who protested the Louisiana statute had no doubt about its intents and consequences. This was why the legislation was so fiercely protested in the first place. Harlan wrote:

The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. . . .State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible and to keep alive a conflict of races the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.

The racial aggressions Justice Harlan foresaw followed the Court’s decision in 1896. Segregation laws separated the races in trains, theaters, restrooms, water fountains, and most public spaces. The enactment of laws and ordinances requiring racial segregation continued through the 1920s and 1930s and remained in effect until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – specifically, until the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which held that segregated schools were inherently unequal and violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned separate but equal public facilities.

Review Questions

1. African American activist W. E. B. Du Bois observed that, before the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson ,

• under Louisiana law, blacks and whites were always legally separate
• access to public transportation in Louisiana had always been equal under the law
• legal segregation in Louisiana did not exist until the 1890 law
• he should be used in a test case

2. Homer Plessy was selected as a test case for challenging the Louisiana segregation law because he was

• a lawyer and knew the law was unconstitutional
• seven-eighths white but under Louisiana law legally black
• the founder of the Citizens Equal Rights League
• a journalist

3. According to the majority opinion in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision,

• the Fourteenth Amendment could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color
• the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly granted political and social equality
• states were given the right to interpret the Amendment
• no citizen has universal civil freedom

4. According to the dissenting opinion in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision,

• the main point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to enforce “political” equality of the races “before the law”
• the Court was unable to see how the Louisiana statute deprived Plessy of, or in any way affected his right to, his property
• the Constitution does not require the government to guarantee equality of results
• the Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens

5. In the majority opinion, the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment included all the following except the idea that

• the Constitution does not have jurisdiction over private transportation
• the Louisiana law was a reasonable regulation to preserve “the public peace and good order”
• the Constitution does not secure “social equality”
• the enforced separation of the two races does not stamp either with a badge of inferiority

6. “The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law” is a quote from

• the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
• the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
• Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson
• Justice Henry Billings Brown’s majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson

Free Response Questions

• Compare the argument made in the majority opinion of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision with that established in the dissenting opinion.

AP Practice Questions

“The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds. If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with the state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of  – equal’ accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done.”

Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537, (1896)

1. The overarching concept of Justice Harlan’s dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson can best be stated as

• the Constitution is color-blind
• states’ rights are superior to the power of the federal government
• the Constitution provides for women’s suffrage
• equal access to education is paramount

2. During the time as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, some members of the African American community were engaged in

• opening vocational schools like Tuskegee Institute
• documenting lynching incidents across the country
• organizing civil rights marches
• boycotting places of business that practiced discrimination based on race

3. Which of these statements is an accurate paraphrase of the excerpt?

• The separation of citizens on the basis of race in public places is consistent with the Constitution as long as the separate facilities are equal.
• Failure to properly regulate the enjoyment of civil rights in a state would be evil.
• Boasting of freedom does not make sense as long as the law itself degrades our fellow citizens.
• Providing for equal accommodations in the future will be sufficient to correct any inequality today.

Primary Sources

Brown v. Board of Education , 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Legal Information Institute, Cornell University. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483

The House Joint Resolution proposing the 13th amendment to the Constitution, January 31, 1865, 38th Cong. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=40

The House Joint Resolution proposing the 14th amendment to the Constitution, June 16, 1866, 39th Cong. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=43

The House Joint Resolution proposing the 15th amendment to the Constitution, December 7, 1868, 40th Cong. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=44

Plessy v. Ferguson , 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Legal Information Institute, Cornell University. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537

Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/

Thomas, Brook. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents . Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.

Suggested Resources

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 . New York: Harper, 2014.

Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. Plessy v. Ferguson: Race and Inequality in Jim Crow America . Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2012.

Horton, J.O., and M. G. Moresi. “Roberts, Plessy, and Brown: The Long, Hard Struggle Against Segregation.” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 2 (2001).

Oberst, Paul. ” The Strange Career of Plessy v. Ferguson .” Arizona Law Review . 15 (1973):389.

“Plessy v. Ferguson.” Street Law . http://landmarkcases.org/cases/plessy-v-ferguson

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Majority opinion

Dissenting opinion.

• What is Plessy v. Ferguson ?
• What did Plessy v. Ferguson establish?
• Why was Plessy v. Ferguson important?
• How did Plessy v. Ferguson affect segregation in the United States?

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• Table Of Contents

Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown rejected Plessy’s arguments that the act violated the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited slavery , and the Fourteenth Amendment , which granted full and equal rights of citizenship to African Americans . The Separate Car Act did not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment , according to Brown, because it did not reestablish slavery or constitute a “badge” of slavery or servitude. In reaching this conclusion he relied on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), which found that racial discrimination against African Americans in inns, public conveyances , and places of public amusement “imposes no badge of slavery or involuntary servitude…but at most, infringes rights which are protected from State aggression by the XIVth Amendment.”

Yet the act did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment either, Brown argued, because that amendment was intended to secure only the legal equality of African Americans and whites, not their social equality. Legal equality was adequately respected in the act because the accommodations provided for each race were required to be equal and because the racial segregation of passengers did not by itself imply the legal inferiority of either race—a conclusion supported, he reasoned, by numerous state-court decisions that had affirmed the constitutionality of laws establishing separate public schools for white and African American children. In contrast, social equality, which would manifest itself in the “commingling” of the races in public conveyances and elsewhere, would necessarily be the result of the “natural affinities” of the two races, their “mutual appreciation of each other’s merits,” and the “voluntary consent of individuals.” Such equality did not then exist and could not be legally created:

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

In response to Plessy’s comparison of the Separate Car Act to hypothetical statutes requiring African Americans and whites to walk on different sides of the street or to live in differently coloured houses, Brown responded that the Separate Car Act was intended to preserve “public peace and good order” and was therefore a “reasonable” exercise of the legislature’s police power .

In his lone dissenting opinion, which would become a classic of American civil rights jurisprudence, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan insisted that the court had ignored the obvious purpose of the Separate Car Act, which was

not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.…The thing to accomplish 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. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. The fundamental objection, therefore, to the statute is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens.

Because it presupposed—and was universally understood to presuppose—the inferiority of African Americans, the act imposed a badge of servitude upon them in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment , according to Harlan. Because it thus attempted to interfere with the personal liberty and freedom of movement of both African Americans and whites on the arbitrary basis of their race, the act was repugnant to the principle of legal equality underlying the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote,

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.

He concluded that “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 ” (1857), which had declared (in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ) that African Americans were not entitled to the rights of U.S. citizenship .

Plessy v. Ferguson

Studying the Plessy v. Ferguson case, or interested in learning more? We break down the summary, brief, key players, facts and outcomes for you on TestMax.

Plessy v. Ferguson Summary

The Supreme Court ruled against an African-American man who attempted to ride in a whites-only train car in Louisiana in concluding that the Equal Protection Clause was not violated by state segregation laws which, in effect, keep the races “separate but equal” in public accommodations.

Key Players in Plessy v. Ferguson

• 1 Appellant : An African-American man who was denied accommodation in the whites-only car of a Louisiana train.
• 2 Appellee : The state of Louisiana, which enforced laws permitting segregation in public accommodations against the African-American man.

Plessy v. Ferguson Brief

The central themes of this case were public accommodations segregated on the basis of race, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the principle of “separate-but-equal”.

Plessy v. Ferguson Facts

Plessy, who was one-eighth African-American, purchased a first-class train ticket on the state-owned East Louisiana Railway. He chose a seat in the all-white car of the train. The train conductor found him in that car and told him to leave the train because it was reserved for whites. He told Plessy, further, that he should find a seat in a “colored car”. Plessy refused to move and was arrested based on a Louisiana state law which allowed for “separate but equal” accommodations for whites and African Americans. Plessy was found guilty of violating Louisiana law for his presence on the train. His appeal claimed that the Louisiana law violated both Thirteenth Amendment prohibitions against slavery and Fourteenth Amendment provisions for equal protection.

The Plessy v. Ferguson Decision

The outcome of this case was a ruling in favor of the state of Louisiana. The Court held that equal protection could not be achieved through “enforced commingling” of the races. It noted that, moreover, the function of the Constitution was not to produce social equality among the races or to “eradicate racial instincts” regarding segregated activity. The court further concluded that the act of separately accommodating of African Americans did not relegate them to a lower social rank.

The Court did not find that there was a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment in this case. It defined the Thirteenth Amendment as being limited to the narrow issue of “involuntary servitude”, asserting that it did not accept the argument that the Louisiana law limited Plessy and others’ freedom to so great an extent that “their freedom was of little value”. The Court held that Louisiana’s law merely distinguished between the races—made them “separate”—but did not create legal inequality between the races. It contended that the law permitted them to remain “equal”.

The Court began its analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment argument by noting that African Americans are citizens who, by privilege, are entitled to “equal protection under the law”. It detailed how, historically, American courts have held that laws (specifically, in the areas of interracial marriage and education) which make distinctions between the races have been ruled permissible and constitutional. The Court did note that such laws which make distinctions among people, in order to be valid, must demonstrate a reasonable “exercise of police power”. That is, such laws must be “enacted in good faith for the promotion of the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular class”.

The Court then went on to analyze the issue of whether the Louisiana law was “reasonable” such that it satisfied the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court analyzed whether the law was merely consistent with “established usages, customs, and traditions” of its citizens, whether it was focused on the “promotion of the comfort” of its citizens, and whether it was oriented towards the “preservation of the public peace and good order”. The Court held that the Louisiana law—and any law “which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances”—generally satisfies those requirements. It claimed that any perceived “inferiority” resulting from the “separation of the races” was a product of the imagination of African-American people and that the only way to achieve integration was to allow African Americans’ and whites’ “natural affinities” to bring them together in spite of “racial instincts” to separate. Even so, the Court claimed, integrating the races in public accommodations would neither eradicate the “distinctions [between them] based upon physical differences” nor increase equality between them under the law. The Court ruling concluded by asserting that segregation was a regulatory question appropriately left to a state such as Louisiana because it did not raise any issues with respect to constitutionality.

Key Takeaways for Law Students

• 1 The (later overturned) holding in Plessy supported the principle of “separate but equal”, thereby upholding segregation laws as constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
• 2 Laws allowing for segregation in public accommodations do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because such laws merely distinguish among the races (make them “separate”) without actually creating legal inequality among them (permit them to remain “equal”).

Faculty Scholarship

Plessy v. ferguson at 125.

In 1896, the Supreme Court officially sanctioned “separate but equal.” Harvard Law School Professor Kenneth Mack explains what the shameful decision meant, and why it still matters in 2021

In 1892, on a steamy spring day in New Orleans, Louisiana, a man — a shoemaker by trade — stepped onto a train bound for Covington, a small village due north on the Bogue Falaya River, which empties into Lake Pontchartrain. First-class ticket in hand, he found a seat in the ‘whites-only’ passenger car and waited. When the conductor finally came around, the man — born Homère Adolphe Plessy — refused to move to another car, despite being multiracial. Now he was in violation of Louisiana’s new Separate Car Act, which required “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” An onboard detective arrested Homer, as he was also known, and he spent several hours in jail before being released on bond pending trial.

Plessy’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. On May 18, 1896, Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the Court’s majority, concluded that, although the 14th Amendment had established citizenship rights for Black Americans, it “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

If African Americans felt that being separated by race was intended to humiliate or degrade them, Justice Brown wrote, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” The Court went on to reject Plessy’s claim that the act violated his constitutional rights — and affirmed the state’s power to enforce racial segregation so long as accommodations were “separate but equal,” in the infamous phrasing of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent.

The decision, which would not be overturned until 1954 in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, placed a seal of approval on the segregationist laws that began to spread across the country.

One hundred and twenty five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson , Kenneth Mack ’91 , Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, says there are still lessons to be gleaned from the case: Lessons about the radical and influential strategies employed by Plessy’s team in seeking justice, about the persistence and dedication of activists, and about how “segregation can be rationalized as something neutral,” even today.

‘The final capitulation’

To understand Plessy , it is first important to understand what it is not. Plessy was not, says Mack, the origin of “separate but equal.” Instead, it was merely the Supreme Court’s validation of the concept — “the final capitulation of the federal government in the creation of Jim Crow,” he says.

“After the Civil War, there were three new constitutional amendments: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments,” says Mack. “There were also new pieces of civil rights legislation in the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and a commitment on the behalf of white Northerners to at least try to defend interracial democracy in the south and nationally, through congressional legislation and through the presence of Union troops.”

But “in the two-and-a-half-decade period after the Civil War, that commitment waned just about everywhere in white America,” he says, leading to a proliferation of legislation aimed at enshrining and enforcing racial segregation, also known as Jim Crow laws.

These laws leached into all areas of life: education, transportation, restaurants, theaters, neighborhoods, and even cemeteries. One example was the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890, which put an end to a comparatively integrated community of African Americans, Native Americans, Creoles, and French that had existed in New Orleans for generations.

An Enduring Strategy

Homer Plessy is often remembered as a shoemaker — but he was also an activist. Born into a French-speaking Creole family, Plessy was a member of the Comité des Citoyens, a civil rights organization of Louisianans working to challenge segregation both inside and outside the courtroom.

Mack says the Comité employed tactics that would be echoed by later civil rights activists, using a three-pronged strategy that included direct action, publicity campaigns, and litigation. “There’s a remarkable degree of continuity between the activists who brought the Plessy case and what the civil rights movement of the 20 th century will do,” he says.

The Comité started with protest. “When the Separate Car Act first passed, they boycott first,” says Mack. “There will later be boycotts of segregated facilities and against segregation laws, all through the 20th century, culminating in the Montgomery bus boycott, when they came to national prominence. It’s very significant that one of the first things they did in this case was to try to launch a boycott.”

When that did not work, the Comité meticulously planned the details of Plessy’s fateful encounter that hot June day on the train to ensure that he would be arrested and charged — and that the world would hear about it. In fact, both the train conductor, and the on-board detective who arrested Plessy, were key players in the organization’s plan to challenge the law. Through newsletters, they would publicize the unjustness of Plessy’s arrest and of the segregation law itself.

We are still grappling with laws that appear neutral on their face, but in fact, are discriminatory. It’s important to understand  Plessy , so we can understand how segregation was rationalized as being neutral.

And once in court, Plessy’s attorneys tried a variety of arguments that would be also be used by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in the early- and mid-20th century, says Mack. “The activists in New Orleans who mounted Plessy as a test case were explicitly thinking about the federal courts, because they understood that the state courts in Louisiana were not going to help them.”

Before the Civil War, citizenship rights were defined at the state level, but the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments created new national protections, adds Mack. “What the Plessy lawyers, and the organizations that supported them, did was to first make the case that the 13th and 14th Amendments changed things and created new and quite vigorous national civil rights that redefined citizenship.”

While segregationists argued that that the mandates of the 13th and 14th Amendments were narrow — eliminate explicit slavery, prohibit only the most egregious and admitted discrimination against African Americans by state actors — Plessy and the Comité pushed for a broader interpretation, Mack says.

“Their claim was straightforward: that everyone knows why Louisiana enacted this segregation law,” he says. “It’s to keep Black people down, to say to them that they’re inferior, to make it so that white people don’t have to associate with Black people, and to do it through the law. Plessy’s claim was about the intention behind the law, that the intention was discriminatory, and that that was exactly the kind of thing that the 14th and even the 13th Amendments had been framed and ratified to prevent.”

Mack argues that this idea about intentionality — that segregation laws were passed primarily to disparage and humiliate Black people — was radical, and while it did not disappear in later civil rights cases, it tended to be strategically muted in favor of arguments that separate accommodations were not in fact “equal.”

“As is widely known, in the Brown decision itself the Court went out of its way not to say that segregation laws were promulgated with racist intent. And we’re having the same debate today: There is a law that is passed that is alleged to be discriminatory against a minority group. But the law is neutral on its face,” he says.

The Road to Topeka

In popular telling, the Plessy decision’s legacy of racial segregation finally met its end with the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board . But there are at least two problems with that simplified view of history, says Mack: it ignores important cases in between that helped chip away at segregation, and it fails to account for the broad scope of activism outside of the courtroom that preceded and followed Brown .

In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1935), Lloyd Gaines, a Black student, was refused admittance to the University of Missouri’s law school because of his race, and the state had also declined to establish a law school for African Americans. The Supreme Court agreed that Missouri had violated the Equal Protection Clause. “This was really the first big case where the Supreme Court revisited this question of segregation and in which they indicated that there might be some constitutional violation associated with some form of segregation,” says Mack.

Of course, he adds, “Theoretically, if Missouri had been willing to build a Black law school that was equal to the white law school, then the Court would have found no constitutional violation. But it’s a significant case between Plessy and Brown, because it’s a major break with the general thrust of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence since Plessy , in that the Court indicates that it’s not going to acquiesce to segregation.”

Brown  didn’t end ‘separate but equal,’ and of course, separate never was equal. But  Brown  was important as a statement.

And in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court declared that “racially restrictive [housing] covenants were unenforceable,” says Mack. “That’s important because the Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the proposition that housing segregation was unconstitutional and unenforceable, and that the courts couldn’t wrap themselves up in discrimination. It’s even more significant because at that time, it was still more or less federal policy to facilitate segregated housing.”

Finally came Brown: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren on behalf of a unanimous Court in 1954. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Plessy was officially dead, in jurisprudence if not in the lived experience of Black Americans. But although the landmark victory in Brown did not actually end segregation, Mack says that it was nonetheless an incredible watershed moment for civil rights activists and African Americans.

[Related video: Harvard Law Professor Kenneth Mack and Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Meira Levinson explain the history of Brown v. Board of Education ]

“No, Brown didn’t end ‘separate but equal,’ and of course, separate never was equal,” says Mack. “But Brown was important as a statement. The first night of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. cites Brown in his sermon, trying to explain why Black people had to resist. It was important for Black people and white people in the struggle against Jim Crow that the Supreme Court had said definitively that segregated schools were unconstitutional. And that it would go on to say that many other forms of public segregation were unconstitutional as well. It was quite important for the Supreme Court to say this, even if forms of segregation would persist for decades — and to this day.”

More than a century after Plessy v. Ferguson , it may be tempting to forget about this overturned and repudiated decision, to relegate it to the dustbin of history, to wash our hands of the impact it had and continues to have on Black Americans. But to do so would be a mistake, says Mack.

“We are still grappling with laws that appear neutral on their face, but in fact, are discriminatory,” says Mack. “It’s important to understand Plessy , so we can understand how segregation was rationalized as being neutral. It’s important to understand and remember how large sectors of American society, and a majority of the Supreme Court, including Justice Brown, who had studied at Harvard, could all believe this.”

The questions the Plessy activists asked — about what it means to be entitled to equal protection under the law, about policies that paper over discriminatory intent with a veneer of impartiality, about the dignity to which every American is entitled – continue to come up, time and again, says Mack. And, again and again, it is people like Homer Plessy — shoemaker, activist — who rise, determined in their convictions, to demand answers.

Related Video

Kenneth Mack, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law, and Meira Levinson, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explain the history of the landmark Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education , the impact the case had on Black education in the United States, and how other movements continue to follow in its footsteps today.

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We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson

Book — Non-fiction. By Keith Medley. 2012. 256 pages. This book documents the untold history of the organizing leading up the Plessy v. Ferguson case.

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In June 1892, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class railway ticket from his native New Orleans to Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The two-hour trip had hardly begun when Plessy was arrested and removed from the train. Though Homer Plessy was born a free man of color and enjoyed relative equality while growing up in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, by 1890 he could no longer ride in the same carriage with white passengers.

Plessy’s act of civil disobedience was designed to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, one of the many Jim Crow laws that threatened the freedoms gained by Blacks after the Civil War. This largely forgotten case mandated separate-but-equal treatment and established segregation as the law of the land. It would be fifty-eight years before this ruling was reversed by Brown v. Board of Education .

ISBN: 9781455617234 | Pelican Publishing Company

Expanding his 1994 Smithsonian magazine article, Medley deftly puts in colorful context the U.S. Supreme Court’s signal 1896 decision sanctioning so-called separate but equal facilities in public accommodations in what has been called apartheid American-style. His ten chapters transform the six-year Plessy v. Ferguson case from a century-old legal landmark into a resonant illustration of the remorseless racism that eroded the civil rights promises made by the United States during Reconstruction. Rich in family and community history and local lore, Medley’s work details the world of New Orleans’s free people of color, who produced and scripted the events, recruited the cast of players, and staged the dramatic challenge to segregation. An excellent complement to the scholarly works of Charles A. Lofgren, Ono H. Olsen, and Brook Thomas, this remarkable read is recommended for public and academic library collections on U.S., African American, and local history. — Library Journal

Medley’s detailed history stands on its own as the most complete historical accounting of one of the Court’s most infamous decisions. — Law & Politics Book Review

An excellent complement to the scholarly works of Charles A. Lofgren, Otto H. Olsen, and Brook Thomas, this remarkable read is recommended for public and academic library collections. — Library Journal

Also by Keith Medley

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