plessy v ferguson definition us history

plessy v ferguson definition us history

The Impact of Plessy v. Ferguson on U.S. History

1. Introduction to Plessy v. Ferguson

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed as a direct result of a group of white liberals meeting in support of the tactics some black leaders were employing; some believed the laws that contributed to segregation needed to be changed. This organization would go on to achieve Federal laws that helped the situation somewhat, but for the real breakthrough, it was not until the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka dismantled the Plessy decision and essentially reversed it, leading to laws requiring integration of the schools and public facilities.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruined the hopes of protecting the civil rights of African-Americans. This, in turn, drafted separate-but-equal and aggravated a trend that led to the segregation of public facilities; separation would come to symbolize division throughout the United States. The case also widened the rift between the civil rights attorneys in the battle, especially between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, resulting in heated rhetoric and increasing lack of political effectiveness.

2. Historical Background and Context

These Reconstruction amendments intended to protect the rights of African Americans to own property, vote, and work in various occupations. Yet despite the passage of these amendments, local governments were reluctant to guarantee African Americans their constitutional rights and liberties. These amendments did little, if anything, to force the Southern leadership of the time to be more accepting of these Constitutional changes. In response, in 1866, the Southern states passed a series of “Black Codes” that prohibited former slaves from carrying firearms, selling alcohol, or voting. They also required blacks to sign labor contracts and allowed the passage of vagrancy laws that could land former slaves in jail if they lacked jobs. These laws restricted the civil rights of the former slaves and were a clear indication of things to come. Nearly 100 years would pass before African Americans would again see significant legislation designed to secure their rights and liberties. During that time, African Americans suffered under the inferior doctrine of “separate, but equal.” These laws were rooted in Plessy v. Ferguson (The Plessy Case). Prior to 1954, when the Supreme Court spoke in Brown v. Board of Education, Plessy created significant legal obstacles to change.

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was enacted, formally abolishing slavery in the United States. Slavery had allowed the cruel and inhumane treatment of African Americans, ironically, in a nation that was founded on principles of liberty, equality, and justice for all. But while slavery may have been abolished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, many Southern whites continued their oppression of African Americans. Two additional amendments were added to the Constitution to try to ensure the rights and liberties of African Americans. Passed in 1867, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed African Americans full citizenship and equal protection of the law. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was also enacted and this guaranteed the right of all citizens to vote, regardless of race, creed, or former condition of servitude.

3. Legal Arguments and Supreme Court Decision

In a compelling alternative synthesis, the in-state/out-of-state case became a contest over the internal vs. external “police power” of the state. According to Tourgée, all passengers were carrying these rights with them when they stepped off the train. In an overwhelming abundance of immunity, Louisiana’s statute would collapse under its unintended potential to challenge all trains as they raced across an integrated, new railway-travel map of the United States. What would happen in Washington, Tourgée concluded, “if every seat were demanded and taken under the authority of this separate-car law?”

Albion Tourgée began his argument by announcing his radical new definition of state sovereignty: a state has no capacity to train by law, on individuals who are not its citizens, privileges and immunities other than those lawfully claimed by or lawfully granted to its own accredited children. Essentially, the state could only protect its own citizens, without also encroaching on the rights of citizens from other states, visiting the same place of business, railway, theatre, etc. He thus argued, Louisiana is also trying to monopolize the businesses of its competitive neighbor-states – and by extension, the development of the South.

Plessy’s legal arguments were presented to the Court by Albion Tourgée, a white North Carolinian who gained prominence as a Civil War veteran supporting black civil rights in the South. Tourgée argued that under Louisiana’s statute, every railway company or corporation, inside its cars, should have the right to separate its passengers on the basis of color. Would any and every company, asked Tourgée, insisting on this right, be violating the “privileges or immunities” demanded by the federal Constitution? This led to the previously announced thrust of the state’s rights, individual liberty.

4. Legacy and Impact on Civil Rights Movement

In response, many blacks moved to the North as part of the Great Migration, prompting a surge in racism known to historians as the “nadir of American race relations.” People who lived in the North and Northwest of the South knew little of segregation until 1899, when Louis A. Martinet, the owner and editor of New Orleans’ black Daily Crusader, decided to shatter the South’s de facto racial segregation and bring de jure Louisiana-race separation to blacks who had known a colorless social life for about a century. The Plessy decision impacted these few mixed-race Catholics who, by 1889, had managed to learn (to the satisfaction of Southern states) how to choose up sides; thereafter, the morally and religiously educated, both black and white, had to attend different parishes. In 1910, the Supreme Court elaborated on its 1897 ruling and expanded the Plessy doctrine to include separate public schools.

After the Plessy decision, Southern states began to require that railroads provide separate cars for blacks and whites. Over the next twenty years, the “separate but equal” system would be extended to cover other Protestant Christians and Catholics, people of different sexes, forced school segregation for the first time, and residential zoning (separating blacks from whites within a state) as well as other racial zoning (preventing blacks from living in the same state as whites). Despite the doctrine, the South, not the federal government, first began segregating. They did not have the concept but their practitioners did. The U.S. Army led the way in 1898, being fully segregated before Plessy was decided. In 1915, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson resegregated the Army after one hundred years of integration.