He sat in the white's only trail car, despite the racial title that was meant to bar him from doing so. Plessy v. Ferguson was one of the most important court cases in black history. 1 Bl. Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 18, 1896, by a seven-to-one vote, found a Louisiana statue requiring separate but equal railroad cars for Black and . After taking a seat in the Caucasian section, Plessy was asked to move to the African American railway car. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". Ct. 18, it was said that the act of a mere individual, the owner of an inn, a public conveyance or place of amusement, refusing accommodations to colored people, cannot be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant, but only as involving an ordinary civil injury, properly cognizable by the laws of the state, and presumably subject to redress by those laws until the contrary appears. In other words, whites and blacks sat separately from each other, in different carts. A Louisiana state law (the Separate Car Act) permitted separate railway cars for African Americans and Caucasians. Plessy v. Ferguson. ', By the second section it was enacted 'that the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to which such passenger belongs; any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison, and any officer of any railroad insisting on assigning a passenger to a coach or compartment other than the one set aside for the race to which said passenger belongs, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison; and should any passenger refuse to occupy the coach or compartment to which he or she is assigned by the officer of such railway, said officer shall have power to refuse to carry such passenger on his train, and for such refusal neither he nor the railway company which he represents shall be liable for damages in any of the courts of this state.'. 337; Dawson v. Lee, 83 Ky. 49. Plessy and the Committee of Citizens challenged his arrest and conviction; however, Judge Ferguson found the arrest and conviction to be sound. Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Committee of Citizens appealed the decision of Judge Ferguson to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances, when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. The End of Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1892, Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, purchased a first-class ticket and sat in the White-designated railroad car. Plessy v. Ferguson . Co. v. State, 133 U. S. 587, 10 Sup. It does not authorize congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights, but to provide modes of redress against the operation of state laws, and the action of state officers, executive or judicial, when these are subversive of the fundamental rights specified in the amendment. Gibson v. State, 162 U. S. 565, 16 Sup. Very early the question arose whether a state's right of eminent domain could be exercised by a private corporation created for the purpose of constructing a railroad. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens,—our equals before the law. F. on the line after the argument. It upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of separate but equal. This may occur. Copies of the information and other proceedings in the criminal district court were annexed to the petition as an exhibit. So, in Township of Pine Grove v. Talcott, 19 Wall. Sup.) v. FERGUSON. He was solicited by the Comite des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), a group of New Orleans residents who sought to repeal the Act. Found inside – Page 118Facts of the Case In Topeka, Kansas, the NAACP was able to find 13 plaintiffs to be part of the class action suit ... but equal that was upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson. Fact-finding for the case led to expert witnesses, namely social ... All citizens are equal before the law.' Railroad Co. v. Brown, 17 Wall. Under this statute, no colored person is permitted to occupy a seat in a coach assigned to white persons; nor any white person to occupy a seat in a coach assigned to colored persons. Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker, lacked the business, political and educational accomplishments of most of the other members, Keith Weldon Medley wrote in the book "We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson." Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street? background, facts, issue, constitutional provision, and state statute, read each of the arguments below. The court upheld an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating racially segregated but equal railroad carriages, ruling that the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution dealt with political and not social equality. Finally, and to the end that no citizen should be denied, on account of his race, the privilege of participating in the political control of his country, it was declared by the fifteenth amendment that 'the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.'. They had, as this court has said, a common purpose, namely, to secure 'to a race recently emancipated, a race that through many generations have been held in slavery, all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy.' The case coming on for hearing before the supreme court, that court was of opinion that the law under which the prosecution was had was constitutional and denied the relief prayed for by the petitioner (Ex parte Plessy, 45 La. But I do not understand that the courts have anything to do with the policy or expediency of legislation. Ct. 625. Others were made at a time when public opinion, in many localities, was dominated by the institution of slavery; when it would not have been safe to do justice to the black man; and when, so far as the rights of blacks were concerned, race prejudice was, practically, the supreme law of the land. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was the seminal post-Reconstruction Supreme Court decision that judicially validated state sponsored segregation in public facilities by its creation and endorsement of the "separate but equal" doctrine as satisfying the Constitutional requirements provided in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. John H. Ferguson, judge of the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, and setting forth, in substance, the following facts: That petitioner was a citizen of the United States and a resident of the state of Louisiana, of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-e ghths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race by its constitution and laws; that on June 7, 1892, he engaged and paid for a first-class passage on the East Louisiana Railway, from New Orleans to Covington, in the same state, and thereupon entered a passenger train, and took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated; that such railroad company was incorporated by the laws of Louisiana as a common carrier, and was not authorized to distinguish between citizens according to their race, but, notwithstanding this, petitioner was required by the conductor, under penalty of ejection from said train and imprisonment, to vacate said coach, and occupy another seat, in a coach assigned by said company for persons not of the white race, and for no other reason than that petitioner was of the colored race; that, upon petitioner's refusal to comply with such order, he was, with the aid of a police officer, forcibly ejected from said coach, and hurried off to, and imprisoned in, the parish jail of New Orleans, and there held to answer a charge made by such officer to the effect that he was guilty of having criminally violated an act of the general assembly of the state, approved July 10, 1890, in such case made and provided. So, where the laws of a particular locality or the charter of a particular railway corporation has provided that no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color, we have held that this meant that persons of color should travel in the same car as white ones, and that the enactment was not satisfied by the company providing cars assigned exclusively to people of color, though they were as good as those which they assigned exclusively to white persons. Such a system is inconsistent with the guaranty given by the constitution to each state of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding. But it remained the law of the land until 1954, when it was overturned . A Henry Louis Gates, Jr. blog. Ferguson was born on June 10, 1838 in Chilmark/Tisbury, Massachusetts. Thank you for watching Black@ND's #BlackFacts series.Black@ND is a talk show created and co-hosted by Emorja Roberson ( @Emorja Roberson ) and Lynnette Wukie. The ruling, which became known as "separate but equal . 80, 11 South. The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had . It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race, but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. The following state regulations pages link to this page. If a passenger insists upon going into a coach or compartment not set apart for persons of his race, he is subject to be fined, or to be imprisoned in the parish jail. A statute may be unreasonable merely because a sound public policy forbade its enactment. The state of Louisiana enacted a law that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race. Yet it is a doctrine universally accepted that a state legislature may authorize a private corporation to take land for the construction of such a road, making compensation to the owner. There is no caste here. While this was the case of a municipal ordinance, a like principle has been held to apply to acts of a state legislature passed in the exercise of the police power.
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