Supreme Court

Plessy v. Ferguson 1896

Comment

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There has been an ongoing debate among historians over the origins of racial segregation in this country in the decades after emancipation. One group of scholars has argued that segregation was not a predestined pattern of racial relations in the post-war South. White masters and black slaves had lived and worked in close proximity before the Civil War, and a variety of patterns of racial relations existed in the 1870s and 1880s. Although southern states did not erect the legal structures that supported an extensive system of social, economic and political segregation until the 1890s, white hostility had permeated southern race relations for over two centuries. What is certain is that the traditions of racism, white hostility toward blacks and the inability of the black minority to protect itself after northern troops went home disadvantaged the former slaves from the start.

Every southern state had enacted black codes immediately after the war to keep the former slaves under tight control. After these had been voided by the Union, white southerners began exploring other means to maintain their supremacy over blacks. Southern legislatures enacted criminal statutes that invariably prescribed harsher penalties for blacks than for whites convicted of the same crime, and erected a system of peonage that survived into the early twentieth century.

In an 1878 case, the Supreme Court ruled that the states could not prohibit segregation on common carriers, such as railroads, streetcars or steamboats. Twelve years later, it approved a Mississippi statute requiring segregation on intrastate carriers. In doing so it acquiesced in the South's solution to race relations.

In the best known of the early segregation cases, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice Billings Brown asserted that distinctions based on race ran afoul of neither the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments, two of the Civil War amendments passed to abolish slavery and secure the legal rights of the former slaves.

Although nowhere in the opinion can the phrase "separate but equal" be found, the Court's rulings approved legally enforced segregation as long as the law did not make facilities for blacks inferior to those of whites.

In his famous and eloquent dissent, Justice Harlan protested that states could not impose criminal penalties on a citizen simply because he or she wished to use the public highways and common carriers. Such laws defeated the whole purpose of the Civil War amendments. His pleas that the "Constitution is color-blind" fell on deaf ears.

For further reading: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2d ed., 1966); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction (1979); and Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case (1987).