Plessy+v.+Ferguson

=Plessy v. Ferguson= 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

//Plessy v. Ferguson// was the central precedent at issue in the //Brown// litigation. This case considered a Louisiana law requiring railroad companies to provide separate coaches for whites and blacks, divided by partition. Plessy, the petitioner, was 7/8 white, and was prosecuted for using a railroad cabin reserved for whites.

Squarely at issue in the case was whether separation of the races could provide blacks with equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found that it could. Though not articulated this way by the majority opinion, //Plessy// enshrined the standard that "separate but equal" provisions for whites and blacks did not violate the equal protection clause.

Included in the Court's opinion was a discussion of segregation in public schools:

"[W]e cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislators."

Here, the Court went on to list numerous instances in which states had upheld segregation laws under their state constitutions. The Court did not decide the question of whether segregation of schools offended equal protection; instead, it merely noted that its constitutionality "[did] not seem to have been questioned." Not only was the mention of school segregation merely dicta, but the Court provided no constitutional analysis, or prior Supreme Court precedent, to suggest the resolution of the school segregation question.

To the claim that segregation stigmatizes blacks and relegates them to second-class status, the Court replied:

"We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it."

This case was decided in a time, post-Reconstruction, of backlash against rights for African Americans. It was a natural progression from the sentiment, expressed in the //Civil Rights Cases// a decade earlier, that whites had tired of making the black man the "special favorite of the laws." The trend was now to restrict the protections of the Reconstruction Amendments.

"The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law; but, //in the nature of things//, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce //social//, //as distinguished from political equality//, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power." (emphasis added)

Implicitly, the Court justified its decision by breaking the concept of "civil rights" down into "social" and "political" rights, although it gave no definition for these terms. The political rights of African Americans could not be infringed, but their social rights were not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. This was apparently so because it was demanded by "the nature of things" in society.

"If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane."