The Plessy Case: Its Impact and Legacy

This article covers the following components: 1. the "Plessy" case, 2. the context in which the Supreme Court made the decision concerning the case; 3. the impact of the Plessy decision on American, particularly, southern life, 4. how much the Brown case overruled the Plessy decision.

There were momentous Supreme Court decisions in relation to the legal status of Afro-American: the Dred Scott case of 1857, which legalized blacks as chattel or property, the Plessy case of 1896, which upheld segregation and the constitutionality of the "separate but equal" doctrine, and the Brown Case of 1954, which overruled the Plessy case.

First, let us see the background against which the Plessy case took place.  Blacks in Louisiana particularly in Orleans had unique status and history. Before the Civil War, a distinct class of French-speaking gens de colour Iibre or free colored people; they did not consider themselves as black; many were rich; some even owned slaves.  Homer Plessy belonged to this group.  He was a one-eighth black or seven-eighths white.  

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first class passage on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covinton.  As soon as he sat down in the whites-only car, Plessy told the conductor he was a black.  He was arrested based on a Louisiana law.  Approved on July 10, 1890, the law ruled that equal facilities be provided and whites and blacks use separate cars.  The law made a crime for African Americans to sit in a white-only car. Like many blacks, Plessy wanted to challenge the law.  However, Judge John Furguson, the criminal court of the parish of New Orleans , issued a penalty: Fine, imprisonment, and no appeal.

Eventually Plessy brought the case to the US . Supreme Court.  He contended that the Louisiana law was unconstitutional for it violated his rights and privileges as US citizen guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.  He further argued that the Louisiana law also violated the Thirteenth Amendment for the arbitrary segregation suggested inferiority and involuntary servitude of the blacks.

His attorney was Albion W. Tourgee of North Carolina . Tourgee insisted that the Constitution is color-blind and permits no different treatment of racial groups.  He further pointed out the Supreme Court should have the right to make a law to overcome racial differences or solve social problems.

May 6 1896, however, US Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana law.  Justice Henry Brown wrote the court's decision.  Brown was a Republican and a native Massachusetts who migrated to Michigan and then New York .  The court ruled: 1, the Louisiana law did not "necessarily imply the inferiority" of the blacks; 2, the law follows the custom; any law is reasonable when it follows the custom; 3. Racial classification was as reasonable as sexual classification; 4 the Court cannot make laws to change customs or enforce social equality.

The loner dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan from Kentucky .  He disagreed on three points: 1. The "separate but equal” doctrine inevitably lead to a rigid pattern of segregation under which Negroes would suffer unjust discrimination; 2. Our constitution is color-blind; 3. "The arbitrary separation of citizens" made. it natural for whites to ­believe that black inferiority is inborn.

The Plessy decision, once passed, legalized the “separate but equal” doctrine and promoted Jim Crow laws as a custom in the South.  The South steadily moved toward a segregated society.  Was segregation a predestined pattern of racial relations in the post-war South?  No, it is not.  Prior to 1885 no Southern states laws required segregation on interstate public carriers for two reasons: 1. The Southern states were too poor to provide separate accommodations; 2. Most whites believed that the U.S. Supreme Court would not support it.  Actually in 1878 the Court ruled against segregation on common carriers, such as railroads, streetcars, or steamboats. 

Ironically, it was in the North where a Jim Crow law was first carried out.  In 1841, a Massachusetts law required blacks to sit in black-only cars.  The “separate but equal" doctrine was first established in Benjamin Roberts v. City of Boston in 1849.  Sarah Roberts, a five-year black girl, wanted to enroll a nearby white school.  When rejected, her father eventually brought the case to the state supreme court.

The well-known radical Republican senator Charles Sumner served Roberts as attorney, contending that school segregation would "brand a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation and harm black children.  Besides, the statute that established Massachusetts ' public schools did not recognize any discrimination of race or color.  He further pointed out the black schools were not equal to the white schools and the school committee was creating a "nobility of the skin" by assigning an entire race to separate schools.  Finally he argued, where caste exists there cannot be equality and he warned the segregated schools were a springboard to further discriminatory treatment.

However, Sumner failed to convince Justice Lemuel Shaw.  Justice Shaw ruled: 1. segregation of the races in public education was lawful under Massachusetts law; 2. racial classification was reasonable; 3. racial prejudice was not created by law and probably could not be changed by law.

This Boston case subsequently influenced the Plessy case.  How did the South evolve into a segregated society even before the Plessy decision legalized it?  Historians offer the following factors.

1. Social Dawrinism supported the soeiologica1 view of the black as an inferior creature.
2. Religion supported racial segregation, the Creator made two distinct races-black and white; nature forbade the intermarriage of the races from corrupting the races.
3. The Northern banking and industrial interests were more interested in securing a stable semi-skilled labor force for southern industry than social justice for the blacks.
4. With the Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party started to give up attempts to break the Democratic “Solid South” or white supremacy. The Supreme Court largely controlled by the Republicans followed the trend. 

1. A succession of weak Presidents, between 1877 and 1901 [Rutherford Hays, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley] further facilitated the consolidation of white supremacy in the South.

5. The relations between racial segregation and the then current anti-foreign agitation/nativism did not go unnoticed.
6. There was a change in black thought from social and political to economic action reflected in the 1895 Atlanta Compromise of Booker T. Washington.  "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Frederick Douglass who died in the same year conceded that education in segregated classrooms was better than no education.

From the early 1870 on a series of laws at the state and national level sanctioned segregation, created a dual citizenship-state and national, and endorsed racial discrimination in public places.  They became the legal basis in defense of the “separate but equal” doctrine.

For instance, in Stoutmeyer v. Duffy of 1872, the Nevada Supreme Court sanctioned a separation of the races.  In the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1 73, the Supreme Court created a principle of dual citizenship—national and state.  In 1869, the Louisiana legislature passed a law that allowed the city of New Orleans to create a corporation that centralized all slaughterhouse operations in the city.  The Fourteenth Amendment to protect only "privileges or immunities" was conferred by virtue of national but not state citizenship.  Interstate transportation belonged to an issue controlled by the local government.  In 1883, the US Supreme Court's Civil Rights Act declared unconstitutional the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in public places.  In 1887, William H. Councill, a black lawyer and businessman traveled from Chattanooga , Tennessee to Atlanta , Georgia .  He was rejected from a white-only car.  The newly created Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that racial segregation was reasonable as long as equal accommodations were furnished and passengers paying identical fares. 

The Plessy decision reflected the popular thoughts of the nation of the day.  It is no surprise that it took fifty-eight years for the Brown case to overrule the “separate but equal” doctrine.  Historians offer the following factors behind the success of the Brown case.

1. Radical whites of both the Populist Movement and the Progressive Movement supported desegregation for they attempted to attract blacks as a common ally against a common grievance and a common oppressor.
2. World War I enhanced blacks' awareness of being discriminated by white America . "We returned, we returned from fighting, we return fighting.”
3. From the early 20th century black intellectuals and politicians led the struggle against segregation.  Franz Boas (in anthropology) and W.E.B. Du Bois (in sociology) criticized social Darwinism.  Du Bois further argued that racial inequality was the direct result of slavery.  Charles Hamilton Houston, growing up in a Washington , D.C. , middle-class black family, a Harvard Law School graduate, sought to build a cadre of black lawyers who would challenge the system.  In 1929 Houston became dean of the Howard University School of Law, in 1934, special counsel to the NAACP to challenge the "separate but equal" doctrine.  These black leaders led the "New Negro" movement, with the Harlem Renaissance in particular, and formed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund for racial equality.
4. The considerable educational change that occurred within black education, the creation of black school bureaucracies and school administrators, and the emergence of black secondary and higher education in the three decades before Brown case.  They joined forces with the NAACP and the Urban League in the fight for civil rights.
5. Meanwhile, black masses were increasingly better educated and expressed greater interest in politics.  In 1896, about 90 percent of the Negro population lived in the South and more than 80 percent of them lived on farms. By 1954, less than two thirds lived in the south and only 20 percent remained on farms; by 1954, thousands of blacks migrated to the north and voted.  Many even ran for public office, and some were elected.  As a result of the great increase in the literacy rate Negroes developed able leadership in most fields of social life.  A increasing number of competent Negro leaders appeared.
6. World War II influenced rights groups like the NAACP that further urged the government to make conditions more equal for blacks in the armed forces.  For instance, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led protests against segregation, particularly in the armed forces and defense industries during the war.  His threat to bring thousands of blacks to protest in Washington, D. C., in 1941 forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, stating that there should be "no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin."  The Committee on Fair Employment Practices was subsequently established to handle discrimination complaints.
7. The United States could not afford to maintain its policy of isolation as it was serving as the "arsenal of democracy” and the leader of the "free world.'  Non-whites represented most of the nations the US proposed to lead.  If America was to maintain its position as representative of the "free world" it must get our own house in order "with all deliberate speed."

A few years before the Brown case, several states had struck down the legal basis on which segregated residential areas, disfranchised blacks, and treated black students unfairly.  In 1948, the Shelly v. Kraemer and in 1953, Barrows v. Jackson , the local courts struck down the legal basis on which segregated residential areas.  Classic case of 1941 and the Smith v. Allwright of 1944 recognized that laws disfranchising Negroes were outworn and a threat to national unity.  Rice v. Elmore of 1948, Baskin v. Brown of 1949, and Terry v. Adams of 1953, state laws designed to disfranchise Negroes are unconstitutional.

In Sweatt v. Painter, (1950), the Court ruled that a separate law school for blacks in Texas could not provide an education equal to that available to whites at the more established University of Texas Law School.  The new law made it pragmatically impossible for any state to set up a segregated law school.  In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, the Court ruled that separate library and lecture hall seats for a single black graduate student were a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment rights of "due process" for a public institution of higher learning could not provide different treatment to a student solely because of his /her race.

However, neither case addressed the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy.  Thurgood Marshall, the leading lawyer of the two cases, and his legal team sponsored by NAACP helped file five separate cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware. These five were eventually combined into Brown v. Board of Education.

Marshall and his legal team realized the Court would have to be shown the "separate but equal ruling violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and it may psychologically damage African-Americans, especially the children.  Marshall and his legal team invited several prominent social scientists to study the situation in Topeka , Kansas . Dr Horace B. English, a psychology professor at Ohio State University , was invited to testify: Legal segregation definitely depresses the Negro's expectancy and is therefore prejudicial to his learning.  In September of 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson suffered a fatal heart attack.  Vinson's replacement was Earl Warren, the popular and well-respected governor of California .   Warren had a good reputation for fairness and honesty.

On May 17, 1954, the US Supreme Court Justices delivered their decisions.   Warren wrote that segregated schools damage African American students by generating a feeling of inferiority among them and thus affect their hearts and minds in a way unlike ever to be done.  Separate educational facilities are deprived black students of their equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregated education limits the development of the individual and thus threatens our national life.

Historians disagree over the significance of the Brown case or whether it totally overruled the Plessy decision.  Most give a positive assessment. It established the concept of equal justice under law and caused major changes in race relations throughout America , particularly in the south and southwest. It was a “second emancipation act" for the Southern blacks and the most important Supreme Court case of the twentieth century.  Historian David Halberstam stated: The Brown decision not only legally ended segregation, but also deprived segregationist practices of their moral legitimacy."

Some historians disagree.  The Brown decision was toothless.  Worse, it polarized public opinion, stiffened white southern resistance, and put southern white racial moderates in a political different position. Some states refused to make any move toward integration.  For example, Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas , called in the National Guard when nine black children tried to attend a previously all white school in Little Rock .  Finally, President Eisenhower sent federal paratroops to enforce the new court order.

The struggle for an equal system did not end in 1954.  For instance, in 1962 the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled in the Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education that there was "no evidence that racial integration could reduce these differences [in school performance].  Nearly 50 years after Brown, American public schools are becoming increasingly racially segregated, for instance, in 1990 76 percent of students in Boston public schools were black or Hispanic; in 2002, 86 percent.  Meanwhile, a separate scholarship program was set up for blacks; categorize black students as inferior to white students, Florida 's New Law School for Blacks.

Finally, the Brown Case did not incorporate Harlan's color-blind theory into the Constitution.  In Plessy, the Court established one extreme of such a policy as to grant states the authority to discriminate on the basis of race in order to impose on African American the status of second-class citizenship.  A century later, affirmative-action represents the other extreme.  Neither segregation nor affirmative action would be possible under Harlan's principle.  If Tourgee understood a color-blind logic as a means to fight racism, today's conservative policymakers invoke a color-blind rhetoric to repeat Affirmative Action, head-star programs, and welfare benefits.

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