The Supreme Court ruling on May 18, 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson established the “separate but equal” standard that would legitimize segregation based on race. The ruling would stand for nearly 58 years when on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court would rule against segregation of educational institutions in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. This ruling would end segregation in the educational system, but left other forms of legalized segregation in place until July 2, 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending all forms of segregation and discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The court in 1896 felt justified in the ruling to establish the “separate but equal”
The 1896 ruling further cemented and supported a long history of racism, discrimination, and violence against minorities in the United States, particularly the southern states. The case was based on a Louisiana law passed in 1890 called the “Separate Car Act” which created a division of transportation that required black passengers to ride in a separate car from white passengers. Mr. Homer Adolph Plessy, who claimed to be 7/8 white and 1/8 black, entered the “whites only” passenger car of the East Louisiana Railroad. The law considered him black because he was not “100% white,” and therefore ineligible to be a passenger in the “whites only” car. Mr. Plessy’s argument was that the Louisiana law violated his United States Constitution 13th and 14th Amendment rights providing for freedom from slavery and equal treatment under the law. The case was tried before Judge John Howard Ferguson, who ruled against Mr. Plessy stating that he was receiving equal treatment under the law by being allowed to be a passenger on the train, although he was segregated from the white passengers. The appeal was brought before the Supreme Court of Louisiana, where the lower court decision was upheld. The
Throughout history, segregation has always been a part of United States history. This is showed through the relationships between the blacks and whites, the whites had a master-slave relationship and the blacks had a slave-master relationship. And this is also true after the civil war, when the blacks attained rights! Even though they had obtained rights the whites were always one step above them and lead superiority over them continuously. This is true in the Supreme court case “Plessy v. Ferguson”. The Court case ruled that blacks and whites had to have separate facilities and it was only constitutional if the facilities were equal. this means that they also constituted that this was not a violation of the 13th and 14th amendment because they weren 't considered slaves and had “equal” facilities even though they were separate. Even if the Supreme court case “Plessy v. Ferguson” set the precedent that separate but equal was correct, I would disagree with that precedent, because they interpreted
This case was brought to the Supreme Court with Plessey’s argument being that his 13th and 14th Amendments was being violated. But Louisiana argued that the 14th Amendment states that everyone is to be treated equally and that is exactly what happened. They said that the cars were separate but equal and that abided by the Constitution while keeping the Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court decided that no law was violated and took the state’s side. The Court upheld Plessey’s conviction, and ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to “equal facilities,” not the “same facilities.” In this ruling, the Supreme Court created the principle of “separate but equal,”(“Judicial Review”,
The court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson created nationwide controversy in the United States due to the fact that its outcome would ultimately affect every citizen of our country. On Tuesday, June 7th, 1892, Mr. Homer Plessy purchased a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad for a trip from New Orleans to Covington. He then entered a passenger car and took a vacant seat in a coach where white passengers were also sitting. There was another coach assigned to people who weren’t of the white race, but this railroad was a common carrier and was not authorized to discriminate passengers based off of their race. (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus”).Mr. Plessy was a “Creole of Color”, a person who traces their heritage back to some of the Caribbean, French, and Spanish who settled into Louisiana before it was part of the US (“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow”). Even though Plessy was only one eighth African American, and could pass for a full white man, still he was threatened to be penalized and ejected from the train if he did not vacate to the non-white coach (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus). In ...
Because of the 13th and 14th Amendments freeing slaves and granting equal protection under the law grants Jon the same rights to ride the train as any other citizen. Santa Clara County v. Southern Public Railroad, Even though the case was not about the 14th Amendment, Justice Morrison Remick Waite made it so by arguing that corporations must comply with the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Public Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886). Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy sat in a whites-only train car, he was asked to move to the car reserved for blacks, because state law mandated segregation. The court held that segregation is not necessarily unlawful discrimination as long as the races are treated equally. The impact of Plessy was to relegate blacks to second-class citizenship. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). However, this is not equal
Homer Plessy, who has seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent attempted to sit in an all-white-railroad car in 1896. After refusing to sit in the black railway carriage car, Plessy was arrested for violating the Louisiana Separate Car Act, which required that all railroads operating in the state provide "equal but separate accommodations" for white and African American passengers, it prohibited passengers from entering accommodations other than those to which they had been assigned on basis of their race. Plessy went to court and argued that the separate cars violated the Thirteen and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, which was made in order to abolish slavery and to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law. The judge of this time was John Howard Ferguson; he stated that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies as long as they operated within state boundaries. Plessy was convicted and sentenced to pay a $25 fine. Plessy decided to appeal the decision to ...
Oliver Brown, father of Linda Brown decided that his third grade daughter should not have to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard just to get to the bus stop before she could even get to the separate Negro school for her area. He attempted to enroll her in the white public school only three blocks from their home, but her enrollment was denied due to her race. The browns believed this was a violation of their rights, and took their case to the courts. This wasn’t the first time that blacks found their constitutional rights violated. After the civil war, laws were passed to continue the separation of blacks and whites throughout the southern states, starting with the Jim Crow laws which officially segregated the whites from the black. It wasn’t until 1896 in Plessy vs. Ferguson that black people even began to see equality as an option. Nothing changed in the world until 1954 when the historical ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education that anything changed. Until then, all stores, restaurants, schools and public places were deemed ‘separate but equal’ through the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling in 1896. Many cases just like the Brown vs. Board of Education were taken to the Supreme Court together in a class action suite. The world changed when nine justices made the decision to deem segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
Segregation in itself is an issue of legality, but this case especially was an unfair One. When segregation was the law it was brought up in the courts because segregation itself may clash with the fourteenth amendment, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside" (Compton's 6). This amendment states that all people born or naturalized in the USA are citizens. This would mean that Blacks are citizens and have just as many rights as any other citizen, but white lawyers and court officials found ways around this. They said that being a citizen doesn't have anything to do with equal rights between different races (Tourolaw). "The judge at the trial was John Howard Ferguson, a lawyer from Massachusetts who had previously declared the Separate Car Act `unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states'. In Plessy's case, however, he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within Louisiana" (Virtualscholar1 1).
Plessy v. Ferguson , a very important case of 1896 in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the legality of racial segregation. At the time of the ruling, segregation between blacks and whites already existed in most schools, restaurants, and other public facilities in the American South. In the Plessy decision, the Supreme Court ruled that such segregation did not violate the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. This amendment provides equal protection of the law to all U.S. citizens, regardless of race. The court ruled in Plessy that racial segregation was legal as long as the separate facilities for blacks and whites were “equal.”
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...
New Orleans, Louisiana was a place of many races and mixed raced people. Interstate train travel was segregated there, called “Louisiana's Separate Car Act.” Many people didn’t think this was fair not only because was it discriminatory, but because there was no way to tell if a person was truly white or black because there were so many mixed people. In 1891 a group of Creole professionals in New Orleans formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a ⅞ white and ⅛ black man, bought a train ticket and took a seat in the “white” car. Plessy was asked to get off the train or move to the “black” car. When he refused, he was arrested. This planned incident was to question the fourteenth
The history behind this case is just as important as the case itself. In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act which forced all railroad companies to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and nonwhite passengers. If someone sat in the wrong section, the punishment was a fine of $25 or 20 days in jail. A group called the Citizens Committee, made of mostly black activists decided to challenge the law. To prove the unconstitutionality of the law they created a plan and Homer Plessy was chosen go against the segregationists by disobeying the law.
In 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were illegal. Brown v. Board of Education was the case that caused the overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson and outlawed segregated schools (Kirk). Three years after this court case, the Central High Sc...
Up until the late 1950s, public schools had been segregated throughout southern America. Many schools in the north were integrated since only about five percent of blacks lived in the north. During the late 19th and 20th century more than ninety-five percent of all blacks lived in the South, therefore racial segregation affected an overwhelming majority of America’s black population. Thus, public schools were not seen as integrated. Throughout the late 1800s and the early 1900s, blacks began to rise and began to fight for the equality in America. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the practice of segregation as long as separate facilities were “equal.” This court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson was one of the main cases that jump started the Brown decision and the Civil Rights Movement. The verdict of the 1896 case did not meet the expectation of most blacks and even some whites and that is why the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909. African-Americans formed this organization...
Throughout American History, many minorities have fallen victim to cruel discrimination and inequality, African Americans were one of such minorities that greatly suffered from the white majority’s upper hand. After the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period following it, many people, especially the Southern population, were extremely against African Americans obtaining equal rights in the American society. Due to this, these opponents did everything in their power to limit and even fully strip African Americans of their rights. The Supreme Court case of Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 is an excellent example of the obstacles put forth by the white population against their black counterparts in their long and arduous fight for civil liberty and equality. Even though the court upheld the discriminatory Louisiana law with an 8-1 decision, John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the case played a significant role in the history of the United States for it predicted all the injustice African Americans would be forced to undergo for many more years, mainly due to this landmark decision.
In the 1954 court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of schools was unconstitutional and violated the Fourteenth Amendment (Justia, n.d.). During the discussion, the separate but equal ruling in 1896 from Plessy v. Ferguson was found to cause black students to feel inferior because white schools were the superior of the two. Furthermore, the ruling states that black students missed out on opportunities that could be provided under a system of desegregation (Justia, n.d.). So the process of classification and how to balance schools according to race began to take place.