Plessy v. Ferguson

During Reconstruction, Black Americans’ rights were affirmed by three constitutional amendments and by laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned discrimination in public accommodations. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down that act, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment did not let Congress prohibit discrimination by private individuals. Meanwhile Southern states passed laws requiring segregation, beginning with schools and spreading to railroads with Florida’s 1887 law. In 1890 Louisiana required separate railroad cars despite vigorous protest by New Orleans’ Black community.

In 1891 a group of Black men in New Orleans formed a Citizens’ Committee to test the law and hired the Radical Republican author Albion Tourgée. With the cooperation of a railroad that disliked the expense of separate cars, Homer Plessy — seven-eighths white and one-eighth Black — sat in a white compartment on June 7, 1892, and was arrested.

Does a state law requiring separate railway cars for white and Black passengers violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws?

By a vote of 7–1, the Court upheld the Louisiana law. As long as the separate facilities were equal, segregation did not violate the Constitution.

Writing for the majority, Justice Henry Brown held that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed legal equality but could not abolish social distinctions based on color. He rejected the argument that enforced separation “stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” insisting that if it did, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Legislation, he wrote, could not overcome “social prejudice.”

Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky dissented alone. He called the law “inconsistent with the personal liberties of citizens, white and black,” and “hostile to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution,” warning that it would let states “place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens.”

Plessy legitimized the spread of segregation throughout the South — in schools, transportation, restaurants, theaters, hospitals, and cemeteries — and the facilities provided to Black Americans were almost never equal. For more than fifty years, the overwhelming majority of African Americans were reduced to second-class citizenship.

Harlan’s lone dissent came to be celebrated as prophetic. Civil rights lawyers spent decades challenging “separate but equal,” and in 1954 the Court unanimously held in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools are inherently unequal. Plessy is today regarded as one of the Court’s gravest errors.