Read the Excerpt From the Us Supreme Court Case Plessy V. Ferguson (1896)
During the era of Reconstruction, black Americans' political rights were affirmed past 3 constitutional amendments and numerous laws passed by Congress. Racial discrimination was attacked on a particularly broad front by the Civil Rights Human activity of 1875. This legislation fabricated it a offense for an individual to deny "the total and equal enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters and other places of public entertainment; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and colour."
In 1883, the Supreme Courtroom struck downwards the 1875 human activity, ruling that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress authorisation to foreclose bigotry past private individuals. Victims of racial discrimination were told to seek relief not from the Federal Government, only from u.s.. Unfortunately, state governments were passing legislation that codified inequality betwixt the races. Laws requiring the establishment of dissever schools for children of each race were nigh common; nevertheless, segregation was soon extended to encompass nigh public and semi-public facilities.
Offset with passage of an 1887 Florida law, states began to require that railroads furnish separate accommodations for each race. These measures were unpopular with the railway companies that bore the expense of adding Jim Crow cars. Segregation of the railroads was fifty-fifty more than objectionable to blackness citizens, who saw it every bit a further step toward the full repudiation of three ramble amendments. When such a neb was proposed before the Louisiana legislature in 1890, the articulate black community of New Orleans protested vigorously. Yet, despite the presence of 16 black legislators in the state assembly, the law was passed. It required either separate passenger coaches or partitioned coaches to provide segregated accommodations for each race. Passengers were required to sit in the appropriate areas or face a $25 fine or a 20-twenty-four hours jail sentence. Blackness nurses attending white children were permitted to ride in white compartments, however.
In 1891, a group of concerned immature black men of New Orleans formed the "Citizens' Committee to Examination the Constitutionality of the Split up Car Law." They raised coin and engaged Albion W. Tourgée, a prominent Radical Republican writer and political leader, as their lawyer. On May 15, 1892, the Louisiana Country Supreme Court decided in favor of the Pullman Company'due south claim that the police force was unconstitutional as information technology applied to interstate travel. Encouraged, the committee decided to printing a exam instance on intrastate travel. With the cooperation of the East Louisiana Railroad, on June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a mulatto (7/viii white), seated himself in a white compartment, was challenged by the conductor, and was arrested and charged with violating the country police force. In the Criminal Commune Court for the Parish of Orleans, Tourgée argued that the law requiring "separate but equal accommodations" was unconstitutional. When Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against him, Plessy applied to the State Supreme Court for a writ of prohibition and certiorari. Although the court upheld the country constabulary, it granted Plessy's petition for a writ of error that would enable him to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
In 1896, the Supreme Courtroom issued its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Justice Henry Brown of Michigan delivered the bulk opinion, which sustained the constitutionality of Louisiana'southward Jim Crow law. In function, he said:
"Nosotros 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 non by reason of annihilation found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it… The argument as well assumes that social prejudice may exist overcome past legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured except by an enforced commingling of the two races… If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, i cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the The states cannot put them upon the same plane."
In a powerful dissent, conservation Kentuckian John Marshall Harlan wrote:
"I am of the opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberties of citizens, white and blackness, in that State, and hostile to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the Us. If laws of like grapheme should be enacted in the several States of the Union, the issue would be in the highest caste mischievous. Slavery as an establishment tolerated by police force would, it is true, have disappeared from our country, but at that place would remain a power in the states, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the blessings of liberty; to regulate ceremonious rights common to all citizens, upon the basis of race; and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a big body of American citizens, now constituting a office of the political community, called the people of the United States, for whom an by whom, through representatives, our government is administrated. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Consititution to each State of a republican course of regime, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or past the courts in the belch of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any Land to the contrary notwithstanding."
Indeed, it was not until the Supreme Court'southward decision in Brownish 5. Lath of Education of Topeka, Kansas and congressional civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s that systematic segregation under state law was ended. In the wake of those Federal actions, many states amended or rewrote their land constitutions to conform with the spirit of the 14th Amendment. Simply for Homer Plessy the remedies came too tardily.
(Information excerpted from Teaching With Documents, Vol. 2 1880-1929. [Santa Barbara, CA: National Archives and ABC-CLIO, 2002] pp. 57-59
Source: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=52
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