The 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld a Louisiana railroad segregation law and established the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, decided on 18 May 1896, upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890, which required separate railway accommodations for Black and white passengers. The case was a deliberate test. In 1891 a group of Black Creole professionals in New Orleans, among them educators, lawyers, and businessmen, formed the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens’ Committee) to challenge the law, and they retained the attorney Albion W. Tourgée.
On 7 June 1892 Homer Plessy, a thirty-year-old shoemaker who was classified as Black under Louisiana law although he was seven-eighths white by ancestry, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad and took a seat in the whites-only coach. He was arrested for violating the act. Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against him in November 1892, and the case reached the Supreme Court, which heard argument on 18 April 1896.
By a vote of seven to one, the Court upheld the law. Justice Henry B. Brown wrote that enforced separation did not stamp Black citizens with a badge of inferiority, and that if they read it that way, it was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone: “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” He warned that the ruling would plant the seeds of race hate under the sanction of law.
The doctrine of “separate but equal” gave constitutional cover to Jim Crow segregation in schools, transportation, and public life for nearly sixty years, although the facilities provided for Black Americans were rarely equal. The NAACP’s legal campaign, led by Thurgood Marshall, overturned it in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Plessy paid a $25 fine in 1897. In 2022 Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards granted him a posthumous pardon.
See also: Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Reconstruction
Sources
- National Archives, “Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).” Link
- 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities), “Plessy v. Ferguson.” Link
- National Park Service, Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, “Plessy and Ferguson.” Link
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