By Hasan Kwame Jeffries, The Ohio State University
The Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, which completed the Democrats’ return to power, together with the Supreme Court’s opposition to Congress’s efforts to protect the civil rights of African Americans, emboldened Southern lawmakers to pass sweeping segregation ordinances as a way to reassert white supremacy.
Jim Crow and Separate Car Act
The new laws required separate accommodations for African Americans and whites. They segregated everything, from hospitals to cemeteries, touching Black life from the cradle to the grave. Almost overnight, the system of mutually reinforcing segregation laws and social customs known as Jim Crow took shape.
The Louisiana state legislature passed the Separate Car Act in 1890, requiring “separate railway carriages for the white and colored races”. Although the statute stipulated that the separate train cars had to be identical, the reality of segregation was that African Americans always received less than whites—always.
Plessy’s Role in Citizens Committee
The new wave of white supremacist legislation disturbed Blacks in the Bayou State tremendously. African Americans understood that the freedom rights they had fought so desperately to achieve were at high risk of being completely erased. In New Orleans, a group of Black civil rights activists formed the Citizens Committee for the express purpose of organizing a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s Separate Car Act. The plaintiff was Homer Plessy.
On June 7, 1892, Plessy entered the Press Street Depot in New Orleans and purchased a first-class ticket for the East Louisiana Railway No. 8 train bound for Covington, Louisiana, about a two-hour ride away. But Plessy never intended to leave the city; he intended to get arrested.
Plessy’s Mixed Racial Ancestry
After boarding the train, Plessy sat in a whites-only car. In appearance, Homer Plessy looked white. But he wasn’t, not completely. His paternal grandmother was a free woman of color who married a Frenchman who had fled Haiti in the 1790s during the island’s revolution. Plessy’s other grandparents were of mixed racial ancestry, making them Creoles, and making him, according to the racial pseudoscience of the day, “seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African”.
As a result, when he sat in the whites-only car, he violated the state’s segregation ordinance and was subject to arrest and fine. To put it plainly, he wasn’t white enough. He had one too many drops of African blood.
This article comes directly from content in the video series African American History: From Emancipation through Jim Crow. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Challenging Jim Crow
The conductor of the train knew that Plessy was African American. He also knew what Plessy was planning, having been alerted in advance by the railroad company. Like several other railroads, the East Louisiana opposed the Separate Car Act. Company executives believed the law was unnecessary; their trains had been operating on an integrated basis without any problems for years. They also believed that the law unfairly burdened them with the unnecessary expense of having to add additional cars to their trains even when there were not enough passengers to fill them.
Complying with Jim Crow—which got its name from a popular 19th-century minstrel song character—required public performances of ritualized customs to demonstrate acceptance of segregation laws and acknowledgment of the superior social status of white people.
Plessy’s Arrest
Challenging Jim Crow required public performances, too. Civil disobedience, a favorite weapon of the weak, involved publicly refusing to comply with segregation laws and customs in order to draw attention to their unfairness and to test their constitutionality.
When the conductor of the No. 8 train bound for Covington approached Plessy, the shoemaker knew he would be asked if he was “colored”. At the same time, the conductor knew that Plessy would answer “yes” and refuse to move to the “colored car”. A private detective hired by the railroad knew what both would say. He was there to arrest Plessy and whisk him off to the parish jail of New Orleans. Everyone performed their part.
Trial and Conviction
Lawyers for the Citizens Committee bailed Plessy out and stood with him as Orleans Parish criminal court judge John Howard Ferguson found him guilty of violating the Separate Car Act. Plessy’s conviction created the opportunity that the Citizens Committee wanted. It allowed them to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s segregation laws.
The group’s lawyers immediately appealed the conviction to the Louisiana State Supreme Court, questioning the constitutionality of the statute on the grounds that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. But the court rejected their argument. It saw no problem with state-mandated segregation and upheld Plessy’s conviction.
Undeterred, the lawyers took Plessy’s case to the US Supreme Court, where they argued that the only effect of Louisiana’s Separate Car Act was to “perpetuate the stigma of color—to make the curse immortal, incurable, inevitable”.
Doctrine of Separate But Equal
On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. By a vote of seven to one, the court ruled against Homer Plessy and affirmed the constitutionality of state-imposed racial segregation.
The majority held that the architects of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend for it to “abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social … equality”. They also maintained that the existence of segregated schools and anti-miscegenation laws evidenced the legality and legitimacy of Jim Crow.
Finally, they insisted that segregation laws did not stamp African Americans with “a badge of inferiority”, and if African Americans felt that they did, it was only because they chose to “put that construction on it”. For the court, as long as separate accommodations were equal, everything was fine. But separate, of course, was never equal.
Common Questions about How “Separate but Equal” was Plessy V. Ferguson
The Separate Car Act passed by the Louisiana state legislature in 1890, required “separate railway carriages for the white and colored races”.
The lawyers took Plessy’s case to the US Supreme Court, where they argued that the only effect of Louisiana’s Separate Car Act was to “perpetuate the stigma of color—to make the curse immortal, incurable, inevitable”.
On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. By a vote of seven to one, the court ruled against Homer Plessy and affirmed the constitutionality of state-imposed racial segregation.
