History Now. Interactive History

	Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The state of Louisiana enacted a law that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy -- who was seven-eighths Caucasian -- took a seat in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train. He refused to move to the car reserved for blacks and was arrested.


	Was Louisiana's law mandating racial segregation on its trains an unconstitutional infringement on both the privileges and immunities and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?



		US Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown


		The court ruled that the Louisiana state law is within constitutional boundaries and upheld state-imposed racial segregation. The justices based their decision on the separate-but-equal doctrine, that separate facilities for blacks and whites satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were equal. (The phrase, "separate but equal" was not part of the opinion.) Justice Brown conceded that the Fourteenth Amendment intended to establish absolute equality for the races before the law. But Brown noted that "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 unsatisfactory to either." In short, segregation does not in itself constitute unlawful discrimination.



		The court’s ruling in Plessy v Ferguson launched the era of Jim Crow in the United States -- legal segregation resulting in terrible inequalities for African Americans. For a full summary of this case, go to: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1851-1900/1895/1895_210/

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History