Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1896

Plessy v. Ferguson

163 U.S. 537 | 16 S. Ct. 1138 | 41 L. Ed. 256 | 1896 U.S. LEXIS 3390

Takeaway

In short, Plessy upheld state-imposed racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, a rule later repudiated in Brown v. Board of Education and subsequent civil-rights decisions.

Background

Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890 required railroads operating within the State to provide “equal but separate” accommodations for white and colored passengers. Train personnel had to assign passengers to cars or compartments according to race, and a passenger who refused the assigned accommodation could be fined or jailed.

Homer Plessy, who alleged that he was seven-eighths white and one-eighth African and whose African ancestry was not visible, bought a ticket for travel entirely within Louisiana. He sat in a coach reserved for white passengers, refused the conductor’s order to move to the coach assigned to colored passengers, and was arrested.

Plessy sought to stop the criminal prosecution, arguing that the statute violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Louisiana courts rejected his constitutional challenge. The Supreme Court affirmed, upholding the statute’s requirement of separate railway accommodations for intrastate passengers.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Louisiana’s requirement that white and colored passengers use separate railway accommodations violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude.

Holding

No. The statute did not impose slavery, involuntary servitude, or a prohibited badge of slavery within the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Court understood the Thirteenth Amendment chiefly to abolish chattel slavery and other forms of compulsory servitude. A law that classified passengers by race and required them to ride in separate cars did not, in the majority’s view, recreate a condition in which one person owned, controlled, or compelled the labor of another.

The Court relied on prior decisions distinguishing slavery and its legal incidents from ordinary racial discrimination. It concluded that a statutory racial distinction in public accommodations, standing alone, had no tendency to reestablish involuntary servitude or destroy the legal equality of the races.

Issue #2

Whether Louisiana’s requirement of equal but separate railway accommodations for intrastate white and colored passengers violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection, Due Process, or Privileges or Immunities Clauses.

Holding

No. The Court held that a State may, through a reasonable exercise of its police power, require separate but equal accommodations for the races in intrastate public transportation.

Reasoning

The Court stated that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to secure the races’ absolute equality before the law, but it did not, in the majority’s view, abolish all legal distinctions based on color or compel what the Court called social equality. The Amendment therefore did not itself require racial commingling in places where the races might come into contact.

The Court treated the statute as a police-power regulation. It reasoned that legislatures have broad discretion to enact reasonable measures promoting public comfort, peace, and order, taking account of established customs and traditions. On that standard, the Court found no constitutional basis to call segregated railway accommodations unreasonable.

The majority distinguished unconstitutional racial exclusions from jury service, which it regarded as discrimination implying legal and civic inferiority, from separation in railway cars. It also pointed to state and federal practices permitting separate schools as support for the proposition that legally mandated separation could coexist with equal legal rights.

The Court rejected Plessy’s argument that compulsory separation stamped Black passengers with a badge of inferiority. Any such meaning, the Court said, came not from the statute itself but from the interpretation placed on it by the affected race. The Court further reasoned that social prejudice could not be eliminated by legislation requiring racial integration.

The Court noted that the Louisiana statute concerned travel wholly within Louisiana. Because the Louisiana Supreme Court had construed the law not to apply to interstate passengers, the case did not present an interstate-commerce question. The Court also noted, without deciding, that the statute’s provision insulating railroads and officers from damages might be unconstitutional and that the record did not properly present the question of how Louisiana classified a person as white or colored.

Dissents

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan viewed railroads as public highways operated through entities performing public functions. Because the State was regulating citizens’ use of a public highway, it could not condition that civil right on race. A white and a Black citizen who chose to travel in the same public conveyance, he maintained, each had a personal-liberty interest in doing so free from race-based governmental restraint.

He rejected the majority’s conclusion that the statute was a neutral rule applying equally to both races. Its real object and practical effect, he explained, were to exclude Black passengers from cars occupied by white passengers and to mark Black citizens as inferior. Formal symmetry in the statute could not conceal that discriminatory purpose and effect.

Harlan read the Reconstruction Amendments together as securing universal civil freedom, national citizenship, and equality before the law. In his view, racial separation imposed a badge of servitude prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment and denied the equal civil rights secured by the Fourteenth Amendment.

He argued that the Constitution is “color-blind” with respect to civil rights: it recognizes no superior, dominant, or ruling caste of citizens. The State therefore could not make race the basis for regulating citizens’ enjoyment of a common civil right, even if the legislature characterized the accommodations as equal.

Harlan warned that accepting segregation in railway travel would invite increasingly intrusive racial classifications in streets, courtrooms, public assemblies, and other shared civic spaces. He predicted that the decision would prove as pernicious as Dred Scott, foster racial hostility, and enable States to defeat the emancipatory purposes of the Reconstruction Amendments through supposedly equal but oppressive laws.

Quiz

Question 1 of 10

Why did the Plessy majority reject the claim that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth Amendment?