The Plessy vs. Ferguson
1892

The Plessy vs. Ferguson Case established the “separate but equal” doctrine that pervaded life in the American South for over fifty years.  

In 1892 Homer Adolph Plessy was a thirty-year old shoemaker from New Orleans, Louisiana.  He was only 1/8 Black (he had an African American great-grandmother) and he and his entire family “passed” as White, but the State of Louisiana considered him Black.  Plessy was asked by the Citizen’s Committee (a New Orleans political group composed of African Americans and Creoles like Plessy) to help them challenge the newly enacted Separate Car Act, a Louisiana law that separated Blacks from Whites in railroad cars.  The penalty for sitting in the wrong car was either 20 days in jail or a $25 fine.  

Plessy agreed, and purchased a first-class ticket on the train to Covington, Louisiana.  He took a seat in the “Whites Only” car and waited for the conductor.  When the conductor arrived, Plessy informed him that he was 1/8 Black and that he was hereby refusing to move to the “colored” car.  The conductor called the police and had Plessy arrested immediately; he spent the night in the local jail and was released the next morning on bond.  

The Citizen’s Committee had already retained a New York attorney, Albion W. Tourgee, who had worked on civil rights cases for African Americans before.  Plessy’s case went to trial a month after his arrest and Tourgee argued that Plessy’s civil rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution had been violated.  While Judge John Ferguson had once ruled against separate cars for interstate railroad travel (different states had various outlooks on segregation), he ruled against Plessy in this case because he believed that the state had a right to set segregation policies within its own boundaries. Tourgee took the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which upheld Ferguson’s decision.  

In 1896 the Plessy vs. Ferguson case was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court also ruled against Plessy with an eight person majority.  Justice Henry Brown wrote: 

That [the Separate Car Act] does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery...is too clear for argument...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...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.

 The only justice who dissented, Justice John Harlan, wrote: 

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 my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case...The 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.

The decision enabled the expansion of “separate but equal” to pervade many aspects of daily life for people in states throughout the South, where segregation became an institution.  Schools, public facilities, restaurants, hotels, theaters, public transportation, etc. adopted the “separate but equal” policy to segregate African Americans away from Whites and in most cases, make the best facilities inaccessible to us.  

The “separate but equal” doctrine was struck down, finally, in 1954 with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.