Plessy v. Ferguson

"Plessy" redirects here. For similar names, see Plessis (disambiguation).

Plessy v. Ferguson
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 13, 1896 Decided May 18, 1896
Full case name	Homer A. Plessy v. Ferguson
Citations	163 U.S. 537 (more) 16 S. Ct. 1138; 41 L. Ed. 256; 1896 U.S. LEXIS 3390
Case history
Prior	Ex parte Plessy, 11 So. 948 (La. 1892)
Subsequent	None
Holding
The "separate but equal" provision of private services mandated by state government is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
Court membership
Chief Justice Melville Fuller Associate Justices Stephen J. Field · John M. Harlan Horace Gray · David J. Brewer Henry B. Brown · George Shiras Jr. Edward D. White · Rufus W. Peckham
Case opinions
Majority	Brown, joined by Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham
Dissent	Harlan
Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV; 1890 La. Acts 152
Overruled by
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal".

The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Associate Justice David Josiah Brewer did not participate in the decision. "Separate but equal" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

After the Supreme Court ruling, the New Orleans Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), which had brought the suit and arranged for Homer Plessy's arrest in order to challenge Louisiana's segregation law, replied, “We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.”

Background

After the American Civil War (1861–1865), during the period known as Reconstruction, the government was able to provide some protection for the civil rights of the newly freed slaves. But when Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 and federal troops were withdrawn from the south, southern state governments began passing Jim Crow laws that prohibited blacks from using the same public accommodations as whites.

The Thirteenth Amendment served to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime. Under the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, the term "slavery" implies involuntary servitude or bondage and the ownership by human beings of other human beings as property. According to the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Thirteenth Amendment was intended primarily to abolish slavery as it had been known in the United States, and that it equally forbade involuntary servitude. It was intimated, however, in that case that the Amendment was regarded at the time as insufficient to protect former slaves from certain laws which had been enacted in the Southern States, imposing upon them 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. The Fourteenth Amendment was devised to meet this exigency.

The Supreme Court had ruled, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the actions of government, not to those of private individuals, and consequently did not protect persons against individuals or private entities who violated their civil rights. In particular, the Court invalidated most of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a law passed by the United States Congress to protect blacks from private acts of discrimination.

In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed Act 111 that required separate accommodations for African Americans and Whites on railroads, including separate railway cars, though it specified that the accommodations must be kept "equal". Concerned, several African Americans (including Louisiana's former governor P.B.S. Pinchback) and Whites in New Orleans formed an association, the Citizens' Committee to Test the Separate Car Act, dedicated to the repeal of that law. They raised $1412.70 ($33852.48 in 2008 USD) which they offered to the then-famous author and Radical Republican jurist, Albion W. Tourgée, to serve as lead counsel for their test case. Tourgée agreed to do it for free. Later, they enlisted Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black (an octoroon in the now-antiquated parlance), to take part in an act of planned civil disobedience. The plan was for Plessy to be thrown off the railway car and arrested not for vagrancy, which would not have led to a challenge that could reach the Supreme Court, but for violating the Separate Car Act, which could and did lead to a challenge with the high court.

The Committee hired a detective to ensure that Plessy was arrested for violating the Separate Car Act, which the Citizen's Committee wanted to challenge with the goal of having it overturned. They chose Plessy because, with his light skin color, he could buy a first class train ticket and, at the same time, be arrested when he announced, while sitting on board the train, that he had an African-American ancestor. For the Committee, this was a deliberate attempt to exploit the lack of clear racial definition in either science or law so as to argue that segregation by race was an "unreasonable" use of state power.

The intellectual roots of Plessy v. Ferguson were in part tied to the scientific racism of the era. However, the popular support for the decision was more likely a result of the racist beliefs held by most whites at the time. Private businesses often argued one of two points. Either they pointed to the so called 80:20 rule (80 per cent of the population was white and therefore catered for accordingly), or pointed to the fact that many businesses were owned and operated for whites by whites as they had the 'money' (ability to pay). The circumstances and conditions present at the time supported 'ideas' for segregation based on the color of the skin as that also accompanied economic and market 'positioning'.

The case

File:Plessy marker.jpg

Marker placed at Press and Royal Streets on February 12, 2009 commemorating the planned arrest of Homer Plessy June 7, 1892 for violating the Louisiana 1890 Separate Car Act.

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad that was designated for use by white patrons only, as mandated by state law. Although Plessy was born a free person and was one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, under a Louisiana law enacted in 1890, he was classified as Black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car. When, in an act of planned disobedience, Plessy refused to leave the white car and move to the colored car, he was arrested and jailed.

This was an act of civil disobedience carried out by the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) made up of the educated Free People of Color in New Orleans. Committee members were Arthur Esteves, C.C. Antoine, Firmin Chrisophe, C.G. Johnston, Paul Bonseigneur, Laurent Auguste, Rudolph B. Baquie, Rudolphe L. Desdunes, Louis A. Martinet, Numa E. Mansion, L.J. Joubert, Frank Hall, Noel Bachus, George Geddes and A.E. P. Albert

In his case, Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, Plessy argued that the state law which required East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. However, the judge presiding over his case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies as long as they operated within state boundaries. Plessy sought a writ of prohibition.

The Committee of Citizens took Plessy's appeal to the Supreme Court of Louisiana where he again found an unreceptive ear, as the state Supreme Court upheld Judge Ferguson's ruling. Undaunted, the Committee appealed to the United States Supreme Court in 1896. Two legal briefs were submitted on Plessy's behalf. One was signed by Albion W. Tourgée and James C. Walker and the other by Samuel F. Phillips and his legal partner F. D. McKenney. Oral arguments were held before the Supreme Court on April 13, 1896. Tourgée and Phillips appeared in the courtroom to speak on behalf of Plessy. It would become one of the most famous decisions in American history because, for the first time, it established that state mandated racial segregation was protected by federal law.

The decision

In a 7 to 1 decision handed down on May 18, 1896, (Justice David Josiah Brewer did not participate) the Court rejected Plessy's arguments based on the Fourteenth Amendment, seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated it. In addition, the majority of the Court rejected the view that the Louisiana law implied any inferiority of blacks, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, it contended that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy.

When summarizing, Justice Brown declared, "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."

While the Court did not find a difference in quality between the whites-only and blacks-only railway cars, this was manifestly untrue in the case of most other separate facilities, such as public toilets and cafés, where the facilities designated for blacks were poorer than those designated for whites.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner who decried the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the court's decision would become as infamous as that in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

New Orleans historian Keith Weldon Medley, author of We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson, The Fight Against Legal Segregation, said the words in Justice Harlan's "Great Dissent" originated with papers filed with the court by "The Citizen’s Committee".

The case helped cement the legal foundation for the doctrine of separate but equal, the idea that segregation based on classifications was legal as long as facilities were of equal quality. However, Southern state governments refused to provide blacks with genuinely equal facilities and resources in the years after the Plessy decision. The states not only separated races but, in actuality, ensured differences in quality. In January 1897, Homer Plessy pled guilty to the violation and paid the fine.

Influence of Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy legitimized the move towards segregation practices begun earlier in the South. Along with Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise address, delivered the previous year, which accepted black social isolation from white society, Plessy provided an impetus for further segregation laws. Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The doctrine was further justified by a previous Supreme Court decision in 1875, which limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs, only guaranteeing congress the power “to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation”. The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of race. The case of Plessy v. Ferguson guaranteed the state’s right to implement racially separate institutions requiring them only to be “equal”. The prospect of greater state influence in matters of race worried numerous advocates of civil equalities including Supreme Court justice John Harlan who wrote in his dissent of the Plessy decision, “we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law, when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master." Harlan’s concerns about the entrenchment on the 14th Amendment would prove well founded as states benefited to institute segregation based law that would become popularized as the Jim Crow system.

The effect was immediate as noted through significant racial differences in educational funding emerging in the late 1890s that would prove enormous by the 20th century. States which had previously successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased reconstruction era efforts. An example of this is the state of Louisiana wherein integrated interracial labor solidarity and interracial sporting competition had completely disappeared by the end of the 1890s. Jim Crow laws would spread northward in response to a second wave of African American immigration and would eventually extend to segregated educational facilities, separate public institutions such as hotels and restaurants, separate beaches among other public facilities, restrictions on interracial marriage among numerous other facets of daily life. Unfortunately, the separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African American community were consistently inferior to those provided to the White community and contradicted the vague declaration of “separate but equal” institutions issued after the Plessy decision.

Jim Crow legislation related to voting would quietly disenfranchise the Southern African American by requiring of prospective voters proof of land ownership or literacy tests at poll stations. Most African Americans were for the most part uneducated former slaves often leasing land from their former owners and immediately lost their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the political system. Black community leaders who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era lost any gains made when their voters disappeared. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject “lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme”, notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution. The “separate but equal” doctrine would characterize American society until the doctrine was ultimately overturned during the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

William Rehnquist wrote a memo called "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued that "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." He continued, "To the argument… that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."

Plessy and Ferguson Foundation

Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the players on both sides of the Supreme Court case, have announced the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. The foundation will work to create new ways to teach the history of civil rights through film, art, and public programs designed to create understanding of this historic case and its effect on the American conscience.

"It is no longer Plessy v Ferguson. It is Plessy and Ferguson," said Keith Plessy in a Public Broadcasting radio interview with WWNO in New Orleans on February 12, 2009, the day that historians gathered with the Plessy and Ferguson families and a member of the Louisiana Supreme Court to unveil a historical marker recalling the case, according to an article in The Times-Picayune

The marker was placed on the corner of Press and Royal Streets, marking the spot in 1892 where Homer Plessy was, in an act of planned civil disobedience, thrown off the railway car and arrested.

Plaque

• Commemorative plaque.
  Commemorative plaque.
• Front of plaque.
  Front of plaque.
• Back of plaque.
  Back of plaque.
• 
  Press and Royal Streets.

A modest plaque, located on the corner of Press Street and Royal Street just outside of the French Quarter, stands as a memorial to Homer Plessy in the place where he boarded the whites-only railcar. It is located in an abandoned park, across the street from the rail-line, that was once the life blood of the city, and a row of empty, graffiti covered warehouses.

Documentary film

The documentary film, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans chronicles the history and little known details of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Further reading

• Brook, Thomas (1997). Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Chin, Gabriel J. (1996). "The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases". Iowa Law Review. 82: 151. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
• Elliott, Mark (2006). Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195181395. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Fireside, Harvey (2004). Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0786712937. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Lofgren, Charles A. (1987). The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation.. New York: Oxford University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Medley, Keith Weldon (2003). We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Gretna, LA: Pelican. ISBN 1589801202. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Review
• Tushnet, Mark (2008). I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 69–80. ISBN 9780807000366. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• Text of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) is available from: Findlaw  Justia  LII 
• Text of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) is available from: Findlaw  Justia  LII 
• Case Brief for Plessy v. Ferguson at Lawnix.com