Railroad+Co.+v.+Brown

=Railroad Co. v. Brown= 84 U.S. 445 (1873)

In 1863, the Washington and Alexandria Railroad Company sought to extend its rail line inside the District of Columbia, and it petitioned Congress to do so. In its approval of the plan, Congress stipulated that the company could not exclude any person from its cars on account of color.

The railroad company had in place a policy to separate white and black passengers.The plaintiff at trial, and respondent before the Court, was an African-American woman who took a seat reserved for whites and was moved by railroad company personnel.

The railroad company asserted that it had not violated the stipulation made by Congress. It had not //excluded// anyone from its cars because of color; it merely provided separate seating areas on the basis of race.

"This is an ingenious attempt to evade a compliance with the obvious meaning of the requirement. It is true the words taken literally might bear the interpretation put upon them by the [railroad company], but evidently Congress did not use them in any such limited sense."

It would not make any sense for Congress's instruction to be so limited; not only had African Americans not previously been refused transportation on the railroad company's cars, but also the company's self-interest would dictate that it not turn away paying patrons of any color.

"It was the discrimination in the use of the cars on account of color, where slavery obtained, which was the subject of discussion at the time, and not the fact that the colored race could not ride in the cars at all. Congress, in the belief that this discrimination was unjust, acted. It told this company, in substance, that it could extend its road within the District as desired, but that this discrimination must cease, and the colored and white race, in the use of the cars, be placed on an equality."

Because its segregation of passengers on account of color violated the provision of its agreement with Congress, the railroad company was not within its rights to move the plaintiff from the seat she took in the white car.

This case contains a few interesting subtleties. First, the Court repeatedly referred to the railroad company's segregation of passengers as "discrimination." This flies in the face of future cases which sought to apply the "discrimination" tag to all cases of segregation. Second, the Court stresses Congress's disapproval of racial discrimination at a time prior to passage of the Fourteenth Amendment; it is evidence that segregation was one of the evils against which the Reconstruction Amendments were targeted. Finally, not only was the segregation "discrimination," but implicit in the Court's language is the reality that the segregation put one race on a less-than-equal plane with the other. Even in 1873 the Court was finding segregation to be inequality.