Plessy v. Ferguson

People

Homer Adolph Plessy; John Howard Ferguson

On May 18, 1896, the United States Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution as long as the separate facilities provided for each race were equal in quality. The decision established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would serve as the legal foundation for Jim Crow segregation across the United States for the next 58 years. Writing for the majority, Justice Henry Billings Brown held that Louisiana's 1890 Separate Car Act, which required railroads to provide "equal but separate" accommodations for white and Black passengers, was a reasonable exercise of the state's police power and did not violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments. Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky, issued one of the most consequential dissents in the history of American law, declaring that "our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." The case originated not as a random act of defiance but as a meticulously planned act of civil disobedience orchestrated by the Comité des Citoyens, an organization of 18 prominent Black, Creole, and white residents of New Orleans formed in 1891 to challenge the Separate Car Act. The committee recruited Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker and activist of mixed French Creole and African ancestry who could pass as white, precisely to expose the arbitrariness of racial classification. On June 7, 1892, Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad, sat in the whites-only car, identified himself as a man of color when the conductor asked, and refused to move. A private detective hired by the committee arrested him. The railroad itself cooperated, viewing the law as an unnecessary cost burden. The committee hired Albion Tourgée, a white Civil War veteran, bestselling novelist, and pioneering civil rights lawyer, who argued the case pro bono all the way to the Supreme Court. Tourgée's arguments were decades ahead of their time. He contended that the reputation of being white constituted a form of property, and that removing Plessy from the whites-only car deprived him of this property without due process of law. He asked the justices to consider how much it would be worth to a young man entering a profession to be regarded as white rather than colored, calling whiteness "the most valuable sort of property, being the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity." Tourgée also introduced the metaphor of "color-blind" justice into legal discourse, writing in his brief that "Justice is pictured as blind, and her daughter, the Law, ought at least to be color-blind." The Court rejected every argument. Justice Harlan, however, adopted Tourgée's language in his dissent, warning that the decision would prove as infamous as Dred Scott and that it planted the seeds of race-based hatred under the sanction of law. The consequences were catastrophic and immediate. Although Jim Crow customs had been spreading since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Plessy gave them constitutional legitimacy. State legislatures across the South passed a torrent of segregation statutes extending to schools, churches, housing, jobs, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, public transportation, and even cemeteries. Between 1890 and 1908, southern states rewrote their constitutions to effectively disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The "separate but equal" doctrine meant that facilities for Black Americans were always separate but never equal: school funding, public resources, and infrastructure for Black communities were systematically inferior. The regime Plessy sanctioned would not be dismantled until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On January 5, 2022, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, 130 years after his arrest, in a ceremony attended by descendants of both Plessy and Judge Ferguson.