Plessy v Ferguson: A dissent

     In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.By a vote of 7-1 (one justice did not participate), the Court approved the principle of separate but equal, which for the next half-century and more was used to justify laws mandating segregation in every area of life in the South, from transportation to education to public accommodations. The one lonely, courageous dissenter against the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was a Kentuckian, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan.

       

    At issue was a Louisiana law compelling segregation of the races in rail coaches. To test the law's constitutionality, Homer Plessy, a Louisianan of mixed race, made a point of getting arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a train car. When his case reached the Supreme Court, Plessy argued that enforced segregation in theoretically separate-but-equal accommodations compromised the principle of legal equality and marked blacks as inferior. The Court majority disagreed, declaring the law constitutional while saying it stamped blacks with "a badge of inferiority" only if "the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."

    

    But if his fellow justices found no objections to the Louisiana law, John Harlan could find little else. He wrote:

"In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. "Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."

    

    Furthermore, argued Harlan, the decision would poison relations between the races.

"What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation."