In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a Louisiana law mandating separate but equal accommodations for blacks and whites on intrastate railroads was constitutional. This decision provided the legal foundation to justify many other actions by state and local governments to socially separate blacks and whites. Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education.

The arrest of Homer Plessy (1862-1925) on June 7, 1892, was part of a planned challenge to the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act by the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, a small group of black professionals in New Orleans. Soon after its organization in 1891, the committee appointed Albion Tourgée its legal representative. After successfully leading a test case in which the Louisiana district court declared forced segregation in railroad cars traveling between states to be unconstitutional, the committee was anxious to test the constitutionality of segregation on railroad cars operating solely within a single state. The committees strategy was to have someone with mixed blood violate the law, which would allow Tourgée to question the law's arbitrariness. Homer Plessy, a native of south Louisiana who could "pass" as white, agreed to be the test case. The committee arranged with the railroad conductor and with a private detective to detain Plessy until he was arrested. When Plessy appeared before the Louisiana district court, the court ruled that a state had the constitutional power to regulate railroad companies operating solely within its borders and concluded that the Louisiana Separate Car Act was constitutional. The decision was appealed to the state supreme court in 1893 and was appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896.

By the time Plessy v. Ferguson arrived at the Supreme Court, Tourgée and his colleagues had solidified their strategy. Tourgée argued that Plessy was denied his equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and violated the Thirteenth Amendment by perpetuating the essential features of slavery.

Eight of the nine justices were unconvinced by Tourgée's arguments, and ruled that neither the Thirteenth nor Fourteenth Amendment was applicable in this case. The majority opinion delivered by Henry Billings Brown, attacked the Thirteenth Amendment claims by distinguishing between political and social equality. According to this distinction, blacks and whites were politically equal (in the sense that they had the same political rights) but socially unequal (blacks were not as socially advanced as whites):

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the differences 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 on the same plane.

The majority also attacked Tourgée's Fourteenth Amendment claims by arguing that enforced separation does not "stamp" blacks with the badge of inferiority, because both blacks and whites were treated equally under the law--in the sense that whites were forbidden to sit in a railroad car designated for blacks. In his famous dissenting opinion, John Marshall Harlan attacked the constitutionality of the Louisiana law and argued that while the law may appear to treat blacks and whites equally, "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."

The majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson served as the organizing legal justification for racial segregation for over 50 years.

Bibliography

Contributed by Thomas Zimmerman, Computing for ACS course, Spring, 1997.

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