“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Said Justice John Marshall Harlan in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. (“Oyez, Oyez, Oh Yay!”) In 1890 Louisiana surprisingly got the ability to pass a law called the Separate Car Act that said that all railroad companies that carried passengers must provide separate but equal services for both white and non-white passengers. (“Landmark Cases”) The penalty for sitting in a white-designated railroad car when you were not of that ethnicity was a fine of twenty-five dollars or twenty days in jail. (“Landmark Cases”) There was a doctrine passed that everything was “separate but equal.” This doctrine was false however because in almost all situations the facilities were not as good for the blacks as the facilities used by the whites. This doctrine was not thrown into full force until after the court case “Plessy v. Ferguson.” (Wormer)
In 1883 the Supreme Court did not allow the 1875 Act to be passed because they believed that the 14th Amendment did not give congress the right to stop racial discrimination by individuals. People that were struggling with racial discrimination were to find help from their own states. Sadly, many of the states were going along with cases that agreed with the separation of different races. When the bill proposing separate cars for the railroads came to Louisiana in 1890 it was highly protested by the blacks living in that state. Unfortunately, the law was passed. After the Separate Car Act d a group of black citizens joined together and formed the “Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law.” They hired a lawyer and on May 15, 1892 the State Supreme Court agreed that the law was...
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...ty to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Works Cited
LRE , . "Plessy V. Ferguson." Oyez, Oyez, Oh Yay!. State Bar of Texas, 2011. Web. 27 Oct 2011. .
"Plessy V. Ferguson "Seperate but Equal," Equal Protection." Landmark Cases. Street Law, Inc. and The Supreme Court Historical Society, 2010. Web. 4 Nov 2011. .
"Rosa Parks." Academy of Achievment . Catherine Reynolds Foundation, 23 Sept 2011. Web. 29 Oct 2011.
Wormser, Richard. "Plessy V. Ferguson." Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2002. Web. 29 Oct 2011. .
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.
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 ...
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...
In 1896 the case of Plessy v. Ferguson occurred and has been viewed by may people, including myself, to be very important in history. Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in this case, was a light skinned black man, who was arrested for violating the Separate Car Act when he entered a car specifically designated for white passengers on the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans (Hartman 99). Judge John H. Ferguson was the presiding judge of the Louisiana Criminal District Court. Why was it that states can constitutionally enact legislation to require separate accommodations in interstate commerce based off of a person’s race? This was the issue of the case. The Louisiana Statute under review in Plessy required railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in that state to provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races and no persons were permitted to occupy seats in coaches other than the ones assigned to them based on race. If passengers failed to obey these rules...
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.
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
Nearly 60 years passed before the Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , that the “separate but equal” doctrine had no place in public education. Two years later, in Gayle v. Browder , the Supreme Court struck down segregation in public transportation—the same kind of segregation upheld in Plessy. By then the South had built a social and legal system deeply rooted in racial segregation. It took numerous lawsuits, much federal legislation, and a concerted effort of civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s to finally dismantle the system of segregation upheld by the Plessy ruling.
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...
Ferguson trial was a court case about a black man by the name of Homer Adolph Plessy. He was arrested for refusing to not ride in the ‘colored’ railway coach. Plessy had enough of the segregation so he decided to sit up in the white coach. However, it didn’t go well for him and he was arrested. On February 23, 1869, the Louisiana legislature passed a law prohibiting segregation on public transportation. The Government used the term ‘separate but equal’ as an excuse for not letting the blacks sit up with the whites. The supreme court case of Plessy v. Ferguson upheld a ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. “Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contract do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other. (Plessy v. Ferguson). So the blacks and white were now equal, but they couldn’t be together. The government said that the everything was equal when the school that the black children were in had old textbooks when the white school had new textbooks. The blacks and whites were separate but not so much
Plessy vs Ferguson was a case in which it stated a precedent. In 1892, an African American named Homer Plessy did not give up his seat to a white man("HISTORY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION"). He then got arrested and taken to jail. Plessy than went to the Supreme Court to argue that his Fourteenth Amendment was violated. However, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy and set the precedent that “separate but equal” is really equal("HISTORY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION") .
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.
...African Americans were almost always “second-class” to the ones of whites. The ruling permitted state governments freedom when they had to deal with questions of race, and guaranteed states the ability to create separate institutions as long as they were “equal”.It seemed as though the Southern states did not just separate the races but supported differences in the quality of treatment towards blacks. The Supreme Court’s ruling gave the “"constitutional nod" to the unfair and inferior treatment to blacks. The “separate but equal” doctrine characterized American society until the doctrine was struck down during the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. The court decided that segregating children by race in public schools was unequal and violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The doctrine did not give blacks the same rights as whites and the court finally realized it.
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.
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...
In 1896 the Plessy v. Ferguson case made the segregation of blacks and whites legal; and the Supreme Court made the Jim Crow laws legal saying that blacks are “separate but equal.” African Americans knew that was unfair and could especially