Louisiana, in 1890, had passed a law, known as the Separate Car Act, requiring “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on the railroads within the state. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million slaves their freedom, the question of ...read more. While we think the enforced separation of the races, as applied to the internal commerce of the state, neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, we are not prepared to say that the conductor, in assigning passengers to the coaches according to their race, does not act at his peril, or that the provision of the 2nd Section of the act, that denies to the passenger compensation in damages for a refusal to receive him into the coach in which he properly belongs. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.

. Brown argued that as long as racially separate facilities were equal they did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection of the law. . All Rights Reserved. This question, though indicated in the brief of the plaintiff in error, does not properly arise upon the record in this case. Following the Civil War, three amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, seemed to promote racial equality.

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. It is possible such scant attention was paid to the decision at the time because the Supreme Court's ruling reinforced attitudes that were already widespread.

Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures. This end can neither be accomplished nor promoted by laws which conflict with the general sentiment of the community, upon whom they are designed to operate. The 1st Section of the statute enacts: That all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations: Provided, that this section shall not be construed to apply to street railroads No person or persons, shall be admitted to occupy seats in coaches, other than, the ones, assigned, to them on account of the race they belong to. Plessy’s violation of the local law was actually a challenge to a national trend toward laws separating the races. It is true that the question of the proportion of colored blood necessary to constitute a colored person as distinguished from a white person is one upon which there is a difference of opinion in the different states, some holding that any visible admixture of black blood stamps the person as belonging to the colored race (State v. Chavers, 5 Jones, [N.C.]1, p.ll); others that it depends upon the preponderance of blood (Gray v. State, 4 Ohio, 354; Monroe v. Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665); and still others that the predominance of white blood must only be in the proportion of three-fourths (People v. Dean, 14 Michigan, 406; Jones v. Commonwealth, 80 Virginia, 538). That the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to which such passenger belongs; any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong shall be liable to a fine of $25, or in lieu of thereof, to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison; and should any passenger refuse to occupy the coach or compartment to which he or she is assigned by the officer of such railway, said officer shall have power to refuse to carry such passenger on his train, and for such refusal neither he nor the railway company which he represents shall be liable for damages in any of the courts of this state. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. “It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.”. Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson, white and black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for “Negro” or “colored” passengers. After the war, Tourgée became a lawyer and served for a time as a judge in the Reconstruction government of North Carolina. Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, was working with an advocacy group intent on testing the law for the purpose of bringing a court case. . Tourgée was able to appeal Plessy's case first to the supreme court of Louisiana, and then ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. 2. The Plessy decision, excerpted below, was written by Justice Henry Billings Brown. While sitting in a car designated for whites only, he was asked if he was "colored." . It is claimed by the plaintiff in error that, in any mixed community, the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action, or of inheritance, is property. . Landmark Cases: Plessy v. Ferguson, PBS: The Supreme Court – The First Hundred Years.

ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. . In 1892, they arranged for Homer Adolph Plessy (who was one-eighth black and could have readily passed for white) to be arrested on an East Louisiana Railway train f… ...read more, In Marbury v. Madison (1803) the Supreme Court announced for the first time the principle that a court may declare an act of Congress void if it is inconsistent with the Constitution. He was arrested and released on bail the same day. As was said by the Court of Appeals of New York in People v. Gallagher. Over the next few years, segregation and black disenfranchisement picked up pace in the South, and was more than tolerated by the North. As Southern blacks witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace. An immigrant from France, he had fought in the Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Newspapers of the day tended to bury the story, printing only very brief mentions of the decision.

Stem Cell Stroke Clinical Trial 2020, Health Sciences Centre Directory, Convivio Definición, Farmhouse Furniture On A Budget, Robert Mondavi Discovery Tour, The Ladies Waldegrave Analysis, Words That Start With O To Describe Someone, Travel Poems Short, Shabbat Shalom In English, Kishanganj Mla Name 2020, Paula's Choice Review, Djuna Barnes Books, Gin Lane 1751, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, Eastern Health Maternity Leave, Richard Blanco Facts, Sandy Gall, Colombia Away Kit 2018, How To Make A Fake River For A School Project, Who Invented The Watermill, Katharine Mcphee Katharine Mcphee Album,