Plessy Upholds 'Separate But Equal': Decades of Legalized Racism

Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the Supreme Court on May 18, 1896, declared that a Louisiana law requiring separate railway cars for Black and white passengers did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson established the "separate but equal" doctrine that provided constitutional cover for racial segregation across the American South for the next fifty-eight years. Only one justice dissented. Homer Plessy, a mixed-race shoemaker from New Orleans, had been recruited by a citizens' committee specifically to test the constitutionality of Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890. Plessy was seven-eighths white and could easily have passed as a white passenger, but he identified himself as "colored" to the conductor and was arrested when he refused to move. The deliberate nature of the challenge was no secret, and the railroad company, which opposed the law because separate cars were expensive, cooperated with the committee. Justice Brown's majority opinion rested on the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed legal equality but could not enforce social equality. Separate facilities, the court reasoned, did not stamp Black citizens with "a badge of inferiority" unless they chose to interpret them that way. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter, wrote one of the most prescient dissents in American legal history, declaring that "the Constitution is color-blind" and predicting that the decision would prove as harmful as the Dred Scott ruling. Harlan's prediction proved accurate. Plessy v. Ferguson enabled the construction of an elaborate system of racial separation that extended far beyond railway cars to schools, restaurants, theaters, hospitals, cemeteries, and drinking fountains. Southern states passed hundreds of Jim Crow laws that were always separate and never equal. The facilities provided to Black citizens were systematically inferior, and the legal system provided no remedy. It took the NAACP's multi-decade litigation campaign, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, to begin dismantling what Plessy had authorized.