Homer Plessy Case Study

The case involving Homer Plessy, who was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court in New Orleans originated in 1892 as a challenge to Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890. The law required that all railroads operating in the state of Louisiana provide equal but separate accommodations for white and African American passengers and prohibited passengers from entering accommodations other than those to which they had been assigned on the basis of their race. It banned whites from sitting in the black cars and blacks in white cars and penalized employees for violating its terms, with the exception of nurses caring children of the other race. However there was an exception to this law that the law could not be applied to interstate

He said that the Separate Car Act did not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment because it did not reestablish slavery or constitute a “badge” of slavery or servitude. His answer relied on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883 which found that racial discrimination against African Americans in places of public amusement, public conveyances, and inns impose no badge of involuntary servitude or slavery, but at most infringes rights which are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment but pointed that the Act did not come into conflict with the Amendment (History.com Plessy v. Ferguson). Brown argued that the legal equality was adequately respected because it provided each race equal accommodations and because the racial segregation of passengers did not itself imply the inferiority of either race. In contrast, social equality in public conveyances and areas did not exist and could not be legally created (“Plessy v. Ferguson”). He said, “The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but 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 upon terms unsatisfactory to either” (“Landmark

“Plessy v. Ferguson.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 7 Feb. 2018, www.britannica.com/event/Plessy-v-Ferguson-1896.

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History.com Staff. “13th Amendment.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2009, www. history.com/topics/black-history/thirteenth-amendment.

“Landmark Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court.” Plessy v. Ferguson | Www.streetlaw.org, landmarkcases.org/en/landmark/cases/plessy_v_ferguson#Tab=Overview.

McBride, Alex. “The Supreme Court . The First Hundred Years . Landmark Cases . Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | PBS.” Thirteen - Media With Impact, www.thirteen.org /wnet/supremecourt/antebellum/landmark_plessy.html.

“Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).” Our Documents - Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), www.our documents.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=52.

“Plessy v. Ferguson.” LII / Legal Information Institute, www.law.cornell.edu/