Plessy v. Ferguson

Summary

In 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railways to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" and making it a crime for a passenger to sit in a coach assigned to the other race. A group of New Orleans citizens of color, the Comité des Citoyens, organized a test case. On 7 June 1892 Homer Adolph Plessy, a shoemaker described in the record as seven-eighths white and one-eighth African in ancestry, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad, took a seat in the white coach, refused to move, and was arrested. Judge John Howard Ferguson of the Orleans Parish criminal court rejected his constitutional objections, the Louisiana Supreme Court agreed, and Plessy brought the case to Washington. The question was whether a state statute compelling separate railway coaches by race violated the Thirteenth or the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy's counsel, led by Albion W. Tourgée, argued that the law imposed a badge of servitude, denied equal protection and the privileges or immunities of citizenship, and let a conductor decide a passenger's race on sight, taking from Plessy the reputation of being white, which they called a form of property. Louisiana answered that the law treated both races identically, required equal coaches, and was a reasonable use of the police power to keep public order. On 18 May 1896 the Court affirmed, seven to one. Justice Brown held that the Thirteenth Amendment was not involved, since a legal distinction based on color did not restore slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, he wrote, secured political and legal equality but could not have been meant to enforce social mingling; he pointed to separate schools, upheld even in Boston, and to marriage laws as settled exercises of state power. The test was reasonableness, judged by the customs and traditions of the people. Brown called it a fallacy to suppose that enforced separation stamped one race as inferior, and said legislation could not overcome social prejudice. Justice Harlan answered that railways were public highways, that the Reconstruction Amendments had removed every legal mark of servitude, and that everyone understood the statute's real purpose. He warned that the same reasoning would permit separation in streets, courtrooms and legislative galleries, declared that the Constitution is color-blind, and predicted that the judgment would prove as damaging as Dred Scott. The library text gives Brown's opinion and Harlan's dissent from the United States Reports, without the reporter's notes. Plessy pleaded guilty in January 1897 and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine. The decision supported state segregation laws across the South for more than half a century. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) a unanimous Court held that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, and later rulings applied that principle to buses, parks and other public places.

Top Lessons

• What counts as equality before the law

  Brown and Harlan both affirm that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees legal equality, yet they reach opposite results. Brown separates political rights from social arrangements and asks whether the coaches are equal; Harlan holds that the law may not sort citizens by race at all in exercising civil rights.

• Reasonableness and custom

  The majority judges the law by whether it is reasonable, and lets the legislature consult the established usages and traditions of the people. The standard gives broad room to elected bodies, and it also ties the meaning of constitutional rights to prevailing local practice.

• Reading purpose behind neutral words

  The statute applies the same rule to both races, and Louisiana relied on that symmetry. Harlan argued that judges should look at the evident object of a law, which he said everyone knew, rather than its formal evenhandedness.

• The lone dissent and later law

  Harlan wrote only for himself in 1896. His phrase that the Constitution is color-blind was quoted by lawyers in the decades that followed, and the Court's reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) rejected the separate but equal rule in public schools.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Brown's and Harlan's opinions concern railway regulation, the police power and the Reconstruction Amendments; the references to ancestry are legal classifications, not medical discussion.