Table of Content

Introduction2

How the Case came about?2

What the case was about?4

What arguments were in the Supreme Court?6

Decision through out the case8

What consequences were there?11

The Outcome That Came From This Case15

Works Cited19

Plessy Vs. Ferguson

Introduction

Plessy v. Ferguson began in 1890 with a new Louisiana law. It said all railway companies in the state should provide "separate but equal” accommodations for white and African American passengers. To test the law, Homer Plessy refused to leave a white coach and was arrested. He argued that the law was unconstitutional. In Plessy, the Supreme Court held that segregation was acceptable if the separate facilities provided for blacks were equal to those provided for whites. The sole dissent came from Justice Harlan. He said, " in the view of the Constitut ion, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant , ruling class of citizens. . . . Our constitution is color­ blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Justice Harlan accurately predicted further “aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens." Plessy created the legal doctrine of “separate but equal" that permitted racial segregation in the United States. African Americans and other people of color were sentenced to second-class citizenship. They were separated from whites in schools, stores, and restaurants (Carter, 402). Brown changed all that. It was a landmark in the struggle for equality under the law for all Americans. A few years after Brown, segregation by law was eliminated almost everywhere. It took more than 50 years, but eventually Justice Harlan's dissent became the law of the land.

How the Case came about?

In 1890, Louisiana passed a statute called the Separate Car Act, which stated "that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state, shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations. This case has been established in otder to gain the information about the races and the differences related to the racism. Thus, it could be said that this is a very important case study in order to understand the racism and its classification.

Plessy is presented as a landmark case because of the impact of the court's holding on legally sanctioned racial segregation. Therefore, it is placed in a legal and a socio-cultural context with cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1952/1954). Scholars, for the most part agree that the impact of the Plessy decision on society as a whole is unquestioned. In addition to the research that focuses on the rhetoric and law or race and law, there are only two studies that explore the relationship between the one-drop doctrine and racial identity in Plessy. Streamer (418) is the only scholars who have openly acknowledged one-drop reasoning as significant in shaping the court's decision in Plessy. Streamer (418) understanding of Plessy embraces the ...