Plessy V Ferguson

Background:

In1890 a Louisiana law commanded the railroad to "provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored

races." Violation of this law carried a fine of $20 or 25 days in jail. Railway personnel were responsible for assigning seats according to race. Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black, attempted to sit in the white section of a train going from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana. When a conductor ordered Plessy to give up his seat, he refused. He was then arrested and ordered imprisoned by Ferguson, a local judge. On appeal, the Louisiana Supreme Court found that the statute under

which Plessy had been arrested was valid.

Question:

Was Louisiana's Separate Car Act constitutional? Plessy appealed to the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that Louisiana's statute violated the Thirteenth

Amendment, which forbids slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits the states from denying "to any

person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Answer:

The Supreme Court ruled against Plessy.

Reasoning:

Justice Henry Brown wrote for a seven-member majority, with Justice John Harlan dissenting (one Justice was absent).

The issue related to the Thirteenth Amendment was quickly brushed aside. The Court held that "a legal distinction between the white and colored races ... has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races." However, concerned with the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown concluded that it aimed strictly "to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law," but that it "could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality...

Laws requiring segregation "do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other...," he stated. Brown called this "the underlying fallacy" of Plessy's case and postulated that a black-controlled legislature might someday enact similar laws, which would also be valid under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ruled, then, that the matter ultimately depends on whether Louisianals statute was "reasonable." The majority opinion explained that segregation laws "have been generally; if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power." In such matters, a legislature is free to take into account "established usages, customs, and traditions of