But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. The foundation will work to create new ways to teach the history of civil rights through film, art, and public programs designed to create understanding of this historic case and its effect on the American conscience. 163 U. S. 537. [10] The Comit eventually persuaded Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race who was an "octoroon" (person of seven-eighths white and one-eighth black ancestry), to participate in an orchestrated test case to challenge the Act. The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which indicated that the federal government would officially tolerate the "separate but equal" doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public . Later, in 1895 Ferguson's decision was appealed to the Supreme Court of United States as the landmark Plessy vs. Ferguson case of 1896. Ferguson was born the third and last child to Baptist parents (John H. Ferguson & Sarah Davis Luce) on June 10, 1838 in Chilmark, Massachusetts. Homer Plessy Vs. Fergusen: Supreme Court Case 548 Words3 Pages Plessy v Fergusen was yet another court case where "separate but equal" was not implementing equality. It served as a controlling judicial precedent until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, mostly known for the introduction of the "separate but equal" doctrine, was rendered on May 18, 1896 by the seven-to-one majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (one Justice did not participate). Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject that "lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme", notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. [34] Plessy changed his plea to "guilty" of violating the Separate Car Act, which carried a $25 fine or 20 days in jail. Nothing about Plessy stands out in the whites only car. Plessy had been born a free man and was fair-skinned. In Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?, we saw the impact that Sambo Arthad on stereotyping African Americans at the height of the Jim Crow era. Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, two of the descendants of both participants of the Supreme Court case, announced the creation of the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education, Preservation and Outreach. Ferguson Appellant's Claim: That Louisiana's law requiring blacks to ride in separate railroad cars violated Plessy's right to equal protection under the law Chief Defense Lawyer: M.J. Cunningham "[26], On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 71[b] decision against Plessy that upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana's train car segregation laws. [51]:6, The separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African-American community were consistently inferior[53] to those provided to the White community. This website is no longer actively maintained, Some material and features may be unavailable, Major corporate support for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is provided by, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is a film by. The underlying case began in 1892 when Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans. [38] Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine. Homer Plessyan African Americanchallenged the law, arguing that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Plessy appealed the case to the Louisiana State Supreme Court, which affirmed the decision that the Louisiana law was constitutional. Harlan strongly disagreed with the Court's conclusion that the Louisiana law did not imply that black people were inferior, and he accused the majority of being willfully ignorant on the subject. Then as now, Americans remain fascinated with the one or a few drop(s) rule. Tourge himself dramatized the phenomenon of passing in his 1890 novelPactolus Prime,Mark Twain more famously in The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson(1894) and, in our own time, theres Philip RothsThe Human Stain in print (2000) andon screen(2003). Watch acclaimed Black History documentaries on HISTORY Vault. Plessy v. Ferguson Opinions Syllabus View Case Petitioner Homer Adolph Plessy Respondent John Ferguson Location Old Louisiana State Capitol Docket no. The Plessy v. Ferguson verdict enshrined the doctrine of separate but equal as a constitutional justification for segregation, ensuring the survival of the Jim Crow South for the next half-century. As a controlling legal precedent, it prevented constitutional challenges to racial segregation for more than half a century until it was finally overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brownv. If you think about some of the most important leaders in African-American history, W.E.B. [13] Plessy was remanded for trial in Orleans Parish. This exception allowed black women who were nannies to white children to be in the white-only train cars. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). 210 Argued April 18, 1896 Decided May 18, 1896 163 U.S. 537 Read More Opinions Case U.S. Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) Plessy v. States which had successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased reconstruction era efforts. After refusing to leave the car at the conductors insistence, he was arrested and jailed. [58], In 2009, a marker was placed[13] at the corner of Press and Royal Streets, near where Plessy had boarded his train. Yet there Tourge and his legal team were determined to use their test case to dismantle the legal scaffolding propping up Jim Crow. When that body upheld the earlier rulings on May 18, 1896, the separate-but-equal . Du Bois in other regimes, in other nations, he might not be viewed as black. Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass father was white. Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, and a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South. Thomas emphasized how the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was a "race-neutral text" and invoked the lone dissent in the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the majority . The 18-member citizens group to which Plessy belongs, the Comit des Citoyens of New Orleans (made up of civil libertarians, ex-Union soldiers, Republicans, writers, a former Louisiana lieutenant governor, a French Quarter jeweler and other professionals, according to Medley), has left little to chance. FERGUSON. A Massachusetts native, Louisiana judge John Howard Ferguson presided over Homer Adolph Plessy's trial for violating the Louisiana law prohibited integrated rail travel in the state. [43] In addition, from 1890 to 1908, Southern states passed new or amended constitutions including provisions that effectively disenfranchised blacks and thousands of poor whites. The Supreme Court decision 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. [56] While Plessy v. Ferguson was never explicitly overruled by the Supreme Court, it is effectively dead as a precedent;[57] the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that segregation on interstate transport violated the Interstate Commerce Act in the 1955 case Keys v. Carolina Coach Co. As Lofgren writes, Tennessee, having passed the Reconstruction eras first equal accommodations law in the South, had already become the first to subvert it with an equal-but-separate transportation law in 1881. They hired Albion Tourge, a Reconstruction-era judge and social reformer, as their legal counsel. Foundation Board Members include: Raynard Sanders, Ph.D, John Howard Ferguson IV, Alexander Pierre Tureaud, Jr., Katharine Ferguson Roberts, Jackson Knowles, Phoebe Chase Ferguson, Keith M. Plessy, Brenda Billips Square, Keith Weldon Medley, Ron Bechet, Stephen Plessy, Judy Bajoie, and Neferteri Plessy. But, thanks to historians like Mack and especially Charles Lofgren (The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation), Brook Thomas (Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History With Documents), Keith Weldon Medley (We as Freemen:Plessy v. Ferguson) and Mark Elliot (Color Blind Justice:Albion Tourge and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson), whose works provided indispensable research for this article, we know that what is most amazing aboutPlessysbackstory is how conscious its testers were of the false stereotypes undergirding Jim Crow and the just-as-false binary posed by its laws (white and colored) in real time, without any clear definition among the states of what white and colored actually meant, or how they were to be defined. Heres what happens next on the train: If a few passengers fail to notice the dispute the first or second time Plessy refuses to move, no one can avoid the confrontation when the engineer abruptly halts the train so that Dowling can dart back to the depot and return with Detective Christopher Cain. Plessy v. Ferguson strengthened racial segregation in public accommodations and services throughout the United States and ensured its continuation for more than half a century by giving it constitutional sanction. They also discussed the role that Judge John Ferguson played in the case. He was simply deprived of the liberty of doing as he pleased.. How many mysteries have begun with the line, A man gets on a train ? 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. As a result, the Court held, Louisianas Separate Car Act passed constitutional muster as a reasonable use of the states police power, preempting consideration of Tourges hypotheticals about paint and signs and such. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. [27], Next, the Court considered whether the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which reads: "nor shall any State deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." In our mans case, it happens to be true, and there is nothing mysterious about his plan. In 1896, the Supreme Court issued one of the most shameful decisions in US history, Plessy vs. Ferguson. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter from the Court's decision, writing that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens", and so the law's distinguishing of passengers' races should have been found unconstitutional. When Plessy resists moving to the Jim Crow car once more, the detective has him removed, by force, and booked at the Fifth Precinct on Elysian Fields Avenue. Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace. HIGHLIGHTS And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. This was a petition for writs of prohibition and certiorari originally filed in the supreme court of the state by Plessy, the plaintiff in error, against the Hon. As Southern Black people witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the Black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance. Final years. By Rachel Reed and HLS News Staff. [52] Jim Crow laws and practices spread northward in response to a second wave of African-American migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities. Plessy is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history. By 1892, at the age of 72, Judge Marr was a perfect representative of the old order that was reasserting its dominance after the failure of . A month later, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed Fergusons ruling. [29] But the Court rejected this argument.[30]. Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. [42][pageneeded]. Young Ferguson's family was all but wiped out between 1849 and 1861, and after the Civil War ended, and he had completed his legal studies in Boston under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Hallett, Ferguson moved to New Orleans in 1865. Why may it not require every white mans vehicle to be of one color and compel the colored citizen to use one of different color on the highway? The case originated in 1892 as a challenge to Louisianas Separate Car Act (1890). "[24][23], Undaunted, the Committee appealed to the United States Supreme Court. On November 18, 1892, Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against Plessy. Intrastate railroads were among many segregated public facilities the verdict sanctioned; others included buses, hotels, theaters, swimming pools and schools. On June 7, 1892, a racially mixed shoemaker from New Orleans named Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket for a train bound for Covington, La., and took a seat in . HISTORY.com works with a wide range of writers and editors to create accurate and informative content. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. v. Ferguson. After . Ferguson - New World Encyclopedia. However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car. [36], Plessy legitimized state laws establishing "racial" segregation in the South and provided an impetus for further segregation laws. [15], Plessy petitioned the state district criminal court to throw out the case, State v. Homer Adolph Plessy,[16] on the grounds that the state law requiring East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution,[17] which provided for equal treatment under the law. "[40] Harlan's concerns about the encroachment on the 14th Amendment would prove well-founded; states proceeded to institute segregation-based laws that became known as the Jim Crow system. Of course discerning minds like Tourge saw through such theories, but, as Lofgren illustrates in a table summarizing a 1960 study by historian of anthropology George W. Stocking Jr., among 50 social scientists publishing journal articles in the years leading up toPlessy, 94 percent believed in the existence of a racial hierarchy and in differences between the mental traits (intelligence, temperament, etc.) Updates? 256 PLESSY v. FERGUSON. Harlan argued in his dissent that segregation ran counter to the constitutional principle of equality under the law: The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution, he wrote. In Plessy v. Ferguson, lead attorney Albion Winegar Tourge argued that segregation's primary effect "is to perpetuate the stigma of colorto make the curse immortal, incurable, inevitable." The court issued its ruling on May 18, 1896 . C. Vann Woodward, Plessy v. Ferguson: The Birth of Jim Crow, American Heritage(Volume 15, Issue 3: April 1964).Landmark Cases: Plessy v. Ferguson, PBS: The Supreme Court The First Hundred Years.Louis Menand, Brown v. Board of Education and the Limits of Law, The New Yorker (February 12, 2001).Today in History May 18: Plessy v. Ferguson, Library of Congress. In fact, every detail of Plessys arrest has been plotted in advance with input from one of the most famous white crusaders for black rights in the Jim Crow era: Civil War veteran, lawyer, Reconstruction judge and best-selling novelist Albion Winegar Tourge, of late a columnist for the Chicago Inter-Oceanwho will oversee Plessys case from his Mayville, N.Y., home, which Tourge calls Thorheim, or Fools House, after his popular novel,A Fools Errand(1879). Plessy then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As plaintiff in the test case the committee chose a person of mixed race in order to support its contention that the law could not be consistently applied, because it failed to define the white and coloured races. In 1896, the Supreme Court officially sanctioned "separate but equal.". [54] Since no state wrote the "separate but equal" doctrine into a statute, there was no remedy, other than going back to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the separate facilities were not equal, and states faced no consequences if they underfunded services and facilities for non-whites. [27] It held that as long as a law that classified and separated people by their race was a reasonable and good faith exercise of a state's police power and was not designed to oppress a particular class, the law did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. It also legitimized laws in the North requiring "racial" segregation, such as in the Boston school segregation case noted by Justice Brown in his majority opinion. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. [60] Edwards granted the pardon on January 5, 2022.[61]. This case was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens, Harlan had reminded the Plessy majority(ironically using the same inkwell the late Chief Justice Roger Taney had used in penning the infamousDred Scottdecision of 1857, at least according to legend). Learn how and when to remove these template messages, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)", "Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Decision Established Doctrine of "Separate but Equal", "A Celebration of Progress: Unveiling the long-awaited historical marker for the arrest site of Homer Plessy", Plessy v. Ferguson at the Web Chronology Project, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Howard_Ferguson&oldid=1159825585, History of civil rights in the United States, History of racial segregation in the United States, Wikipedia neutral point of view disputes from June 2023, All Wikipedia neutral point of view disputes, Cleanup tagged articles with a reason field from June 2023, Wikipedia pages needing cleanup from June 2023, Articles with multiple maintenance issues, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0, This page was last edited on 12 June 2023, at 19:40. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. In 1892, on a steamy spring day in New Orleans, Louisiana, a man a . In it . Some commentators, such as Gabriel J. Chin[44] and Eric Maltz,[45] have viewed Harlan's Plessy dissent in a more critical light, and suggested it be viewed in context with his other decisions. After the state Supreme Court affirmed the district courts ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, and oral arguments were heard on April 13, 1896. As Lofgren shows in his watershed account, the question was, did a man at the time ofPlessyhave to be one-fourth black to be considered colored, as was the case in Michigan, or one-sixteenth as in North Carolina, or one-eighth as in Georgia; or were such judgments better left to juries as in South Carolina or, better yet, to train conductors as in Louisiana? To sayPlessywas a long shot on such terrain is an understatement. 1, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan. [51]:1618 The principles of Plessy v. Ferguson were affirmed in Lum v. Rice (1927), which upheld the right of a Mississippi public school for white children to exclude a Chinese American girl. This page was last edited on 7 July 2023, at 03:55. The truth is that no one involved inPlessyknew they were on a longer march toBrown,or that their case would become one of the most recognizable in history, or that the sentence that the Supreme Court handed down would take up less than a sentence really, just three words in the American mind. Ferguson was born on June 10, 1838 in Chilmark/Tisbury, Massachusetts. Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the principals in the Plessy v. Ferguson court case, in front of a historical marker in New Orleans on June 7, 2011. In Plessy v.Ferguson the Court infamously ruled it was within constitutional boundaries for the state of Louisiana to enforce racial segregation in public facilities. There he met and married in July 1866, Virginia Butler Earhart, daughter of Thomas Jefferson Earhart, a staunch and outspoken abolitionist from Pennsylvania. We 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. Plessyv. [1], Judge Ferguson had previously ruled the Louisiana Railway Car Act of 1890 (The Separate Car Act), a law declaring that Louisiana rail companies had to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and non-white passengers, "unconstitutional on trains that travelled through several states". The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. [33] Harlan said that this showed that the Louisiana law only allowed black people to be in white-only cars if it was obvious that they were "social subordinates" or "domestics". While today we might call proponents of those theories quacks, they were regarded (for the most part) as leading scientists of their day men with college degrees and titles who, even in those rare cases when they were sympathetic to black people and their rights, felt strongly that mixing too closely with whites would lead either to black extinction through a race war or dilution by way of absorption. Judge John Howard Ferguson died in New Orleans at the age of 77 on November 12, 1915. Judge John Howard Ferguson was named in the case [4][5] Notably the court ruled the existence of laws based upon race was not inherently racial discrimination. Why may it not require every white mans house to be painted white and every colored mans black? [13] After Plessy took a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it, and sit instead in the blacks-only car. At Plessys trial in U.S. District Court, Judge John H. Ferguson dismissed his contention that the act was unconstitutional. Harvard Law School Professor Kenneth Mack explains what the shameful decision meant, and why it still matters in 2021. Get HISTORYs most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week. Fast Facts: Plessy v. Ferguson Case Argued: April 13, 1896 Decision Issued: May 18, 1896 Petitioner: Homer Adolph Plessy Respondent: John Ferguson Key Questions: Did Louisiana's Separate Car Act, which required separate railway cars for Black and White people, violate the Fourteenth Amendment? Board of Education of Topeka explicitly rejected Plessys separate but equal doctrine as it applied to public education and implied its unconstitutionality in all other spheres of public life. What did Plessy v. Ferguson establish? The lone dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan, himself a former slaveholder from Kentucky. Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc. Monell v. Department of Social Services of the City of New York, Will v. Michigan Department of State Police, Inyo County v. Paiute-Shoshone Indians of the Bishop Community, Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee. Why may it [the state] not require all red-headed people to ride in a separate car? Some cases in this period attempted to curtail the Plessy v. Ferguson was important because it essentially established the constitutionality of racial segregation. Find educational resources related to this program - and access to thousands of curriculum-targeted digital resources for the classroom at PBS LearningMedia. John H. Ferguson, judge of the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, and setting forth, in substance, the following facts: The case of Plessy vs. Ferguson was one of a combination of rulings passed by the U.S. and state Supreme Courts after Reconstruction. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled in 1849before the 14th amendmentthat segregated schools were constitutional. [27] According to the Court, the question in any case that involved a racial segregation law was whether the law was reasonable, and the Court gave State legislatures broad discretion to determine the reasonableness of the laws they passed. Bollinger, the landmark 2003 case on affirmative action in student admissions, Thomas quoted Justice John Harlan's dissent in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that ushered in the era of Jim Crow . [15][18], The Louisiana Supreme Court issued a temporary writ of prohibition while it reviewed Plessy's case. Associated Subjects: Ferguson, John H. (Judge) The language of colorblindness that Roberts and Thomas use to make their argument comes directly from Justice John Marshall Harlan's lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that . In December 1892, the court upheld Judge Ferguson's ruling,[19] and denied Plessy's attorneys' subsequent request for a rehearing. Contractors of America v. Jacksonville, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. Homer Adolph Plessy, who agreed to be the plaintiff in the case aimed at testing the laws constitutionality, was of mixed race; he described himself as seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood.. The court rendered its decision one month later, on May 18. Why not require every white business man to use a white sign and every colored man who solicits custom a black one? (Little did Tourge or his fellows know just how absurd the use of signs in the South would become. Shortly after the Supreme Court decided the case, Plessy reported to Ferguson's court to answer the charge of violating the Separate Car Act. Articles with the HISTORY.com Editors byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen and Christian Zapata. Take it away without due process, based on a train conductors casual and arbitrary scan, and you rob a man, colored or white (at the time, especially white), of something as valuable to him as his education, income or land.
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