Countering Segregation
Imagine living in a country that is run by segregation laws. In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law mandating separate but equal accommodations for White Americans and African Americans on intrastate railroads was constitutional. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy could pass as a white man even though under Louisiana law he is legally considered “colored”. This is due to his the fact that he has one-eighth African blood in him, which allowed Louisiana law to prevent him from sitting on a passenger coach reserved for whites only. The majority’s decision was one that allowed states to declare their own requirements, which brands a person as “colored”. The argument made by the Tourgée, Plessy’s lawyer, was, that, belonging to one race or other was a form of property and to deny reputation to that race is considered taking away property without due process of law. After the case a single justice, Justice Harlan, wrote the dissent on the majority’s decision that racial classifications were not inherently unconstitutional. In Harlan’s dissent he argues against the majority decision by sticking to the written words of the constitutional, and not impose on the document his sense of the natural order. Ultimately, Harlan’s counterargument reveals that the segregation laws are inconsistent with the constitution.
According to Brook Thomas, the only way to over come a law that was created to base racism not just off of the color of your skin, but now the percentage of colored blood an individual has, is education. By stating that, he is trying to display the difference between the separate but equal accommodations for education between “whites” and “coloreds”, and how it create...
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...fore no state should enact laws based off of race or class. As a result of Harlan proving that the majorities’ decision was inconsistent with the spirit of the republic, he was able to overturn the cases decision single handedly and prevent segregation from becoming a slippery slope back into racism. This dissent helped reinforce the fact that belonging to one race or another was a form of property and to deny reputation to that race is considered taking away property without due process of law. All in all, though, Harlan was able to prove through his counterargument that the majorities’ decision was an unconstitutional one.
Work Cited
Thomas, Brook. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Print.
Harlan, John, Ii. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Print.
The Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) ‘equal but separate’ decision robbed it of its meaning and confirmed this wasn’t the case as the court indicated this ruling did not violate black citizenship and did not imply superior and inferior treatment ,but it indeed did as it openly permitted racial discrimination in a landmark decision of a 8-1 majority ruling, it being said was controversial, as white schools and facilities received near to more than double funding than black facilities negatively contradicted the movement previous efforts on equality and maintaining that oppression on
During the four decades following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen for full citizenship rights were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites—totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
In 1896, the Supreme Court was introduced with a case that not only tested both levels of government, state and federal, but also helped further establish a precedent that it was built off of. This court case is commonly known as the case that confirmed the doctrine “separate but equal”. This doctrine is a crucial part of our Constitution and more importantly, our history. This court case involved the analysis of amendments, laws, and divisions of power. Plessy v. Ferguson was a significant court case in U.S history because it was shaped by federalism and precedent, which were two key components that were further established and clarified as a result of the Supreme Court’s final decision.
The Plessy v Ferguson case would be overturned, ruling the “separate but equal” law to be unconstitutional. Melba Beals was in school that day and was sent home early with the warning to hurry and stay in groups. Even so, it had been decades since the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment. No much had changed. Melba’s teacher knew that this ruling would cause rage among the citizens of Little Rock and she was right.
...ade for Justice, shed light on the hardships experienced by African American men who chose to resist and fight back against inequality and also provided an example of the aforementioned effect suggested by Harlan’s dissent in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Lastly, Booker T. Washington’s Advocates Compromise offered one solution to the issue of segregation and the general prevalence of racial discrimination. All three primary sources were related in its ties to the issue of segregation between the late 1800s and early 1900s. In conclusion, John Marshall Harlan’s dissent was definitely an accurate prediction of the various obstacles that were thrown at the African American people. Harlan was correct in all of his claims; it is only unfortunate that it took the majority over five decades to finally realize that separate and equal facilities do not and cannot exist.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, is a landmark in United States Supreme Court’s decision in the United States, of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses, under the doctrine of separate but equal.
Cozzens, Lisa. "Plessy v. Ferguson." After the Civil War:. N.p., 17 Sept. 1999. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
While Jim Crow was blatantly incongruent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the full benefits of citizenry, it was justified by the Plessy vs. Ferguson Case of 1896 in which the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, requiring racially segregated railroad facilities, under the condition that such facilities were equal. This “separate but equal” doctrine was quickly, and legally, applied t...
Even though the Brown v. Board of Education was 62 years ago, African Americans are still fighting to have an equal education opportunity. “But many schools are as segregated today as they were before the ruling, and black children throughout the United States are performing at the bottom of the American educational system” (Jackson 1). Nevertheless, it took decades of hard work and struggle by numerous African Americans for a better education system. Education is the key to success, it gives people the knowledge that they need to strive and become more intelligent thinkers, which leads to more opportunities for them in the job industry. Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination of any kind, African Americans have every right to have this equal educational opportunity like everyone else. But yet, they were stopped in their tracks by disapproving Americans, who confined the succession of African Americans in the education system. Now that we are in the 21st century, there’s still negligence on black’s education. The black community do not have equal education opportunities because of the lack of funding, poverty experienced by the children in the neighborhoods and society’s views of the black community.
Separate but Equal doctrine existed long before the Supreme Court accepted it into law, and on multiple occasions it arose as an issue before then. In 1865, southern states passed laws called “Black Codes,” which created restrictions on the freed African Americans in the South. This became the start of legal segregation as juries couldn’t have African Americans, public schools became segregated, and African Americans had restrictions on testifying against majorities. In 1887, Jim Crow Laws started to arise, and segregation becomes rooted into the way of life of southerners (“Timeline”). Then in 1890, Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Act.” This forced rail companies to provide separate rail cars for minorities and majorities. If a minority sat in the wrong car, it cost them $25 or 20 days in jail. Because of this, an enraged group of African American citizens had Homer Plessy, a man who only had one eighth African American heritage, purchase a ticket and sit in a “White only” c...
The request for an injunction pushed the court to make a difficult decision. On one hand, the judges agreed with the Browns; saying that: “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children...A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn” (The National Center For Public Research). On the other hand, the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson allowed separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites, and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessy yet. Be...
The impact that race had on individuals throughout American history is clear. The role race had on social and political relations were nothing but negative and struggled to make positive progression. Starting from the last 1800s, the recognition that, for example, blacks were unfairly treated and seen as unequal was newly acted upon. From the early years of being seen as just economically useful, the feelings of blacks were overlooked and almost irrelevant to the leaders of society. One of the first displays of action against this discrimination is shown in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. While being the victim of segregation in the south as a black man, Homer Plessy challenged the courts when he directly acted against the laws separating whites and blacks by being a passenger on a white-only train. The outcome, however, directly meant nothing, leading to the legalization of segregation laws stating that the separate but equal laws didn’t imply inferiority. The decision made in Plessy v. Ferguson was an immediate disaster for racial relations in the US, but you can only push people so far until they finally snap.
Many challenges had to be faced during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s; one of those challenges being the case of Brown v. Board of Education, which tested the ruling in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson back in the year 1896 proclaiming segregation to be constitutional as long as it was “separate but equal”. In this particular case, Thurgood Marshall claimed that forcing African Americans to used separate education facilities was violating the 14th Amendment which gave the right of equality to all citizens under the law of the United States.
...e to breach Supreme Court sovereignty would render the different minorities, residing in the United States, helpless to further governmental legislature justifying racial discrimination. In their struggle to preserve racial inequality segregationists immorally resorted to using violence against children. Through “a sharp realisation of the shameful discrimination directed at small children” the world perceived an inconsistency in a nation that preached freedom for all, though denied the very same right to its children. Ernest Green and the other eight students “learned unmistakably that they possessed irresistible power” during the crisis but only if they realised it and united against discrimination and racism.
The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern states the authority to continue persecuting African-Americans for the next sixty years. The first positive aspect of Brown was was the actual integration of white and black students in schools. Unfortunately, this was not carried out to a suitable degree, with many local authorities feeling no obligation to change the status quo. The Supreme Court did issue a second ruling, the so called Brown 2, in 1955. This forwarded the idea that integration should proceed 'with all deliberate speed', but James T. Patterson tells us even by 1964 ‘only an estimated 1.2% of black children ... attended public schools with white children’2. This demonstrates that, although the Supreme Court was working for Civil Rights, it was still unable to force change. Rathbone agrees, saying the Supreme Court ‘did not do enough to ensure compliance’3. However, Patterson goes on to say that ‘the case did have some impact’4. He explains how the ruling, although often ignored, acted ‘relatively quickly in most of the boarder s...