Plessy V. Ferguson Essay

The year was 1955 when fourteen year old Emmett Till was murdered in cold blood by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Emmett was born on July 25, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois to Mamie and Louis Till. He was spending the summer in Money, Mississippi with his extended family after relentlessly begging his mother for hours on end, until she finally agreed to the proposition. Mamie warned Emmett to be careful of the way he acted in Mississippi, because she knew how racially segregated it was due to the Jim Crow laws that were passed in the south at the time. It all started three days after arriving in Money with his uncle Moses Wright and multiple cousins.

The Court declined his argument. The Court determined that the segregated schools were considerably equal enough under the Plessy doctrine. It wasn 't until the mid twentieth century when Brown v Board of Education came into play that Plessy’s argument was given the okay by the constitution. The Court tried to use Plessy v. Ferguson to deny the argument that Oliver Brown was giving during the Brown v. Board of Education case. Once the Courts decided that separating children by race could have an overall affect on the black children 's ability to learn.

In the text, “Real History,” Linda Brown, an eight year old African American girl, wanted to attend an all white school only 5 blocks down from her house. However she had been denied and school officials assigned her to a non-white school 21 blocks away from her home. For this reason, her parents filed a lawsuit on the school. Not only did the brown decision reversed the imbecilic doctrine “separate but equal.” The court directed an end to segregation by race in schools across America.

The nation was gridlocked on how to proceed, whether to declare a Civil War or not. The Fort Sumter conflict provided the answer; Fort Sumter was a garrison on the coast of SC that was being blocked by “Confederate” troops, therefore the Union could not provide military supplies and rations for the people inhabiting the fort. Later the confederates would fire upon fort and started the Civil war. The Civil War would last four years, concluding with the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House. However the time during the Civil War provided for many racial and slaveholding changes for America including: the Emancipation Proclamation, 13th, 14th , and 15th amendments.

The year of 1965 the black community let out a collective victory cry. They had finally gotten the rights they fought hard for. They could at last vote, go to school and college, and got the working condition they deserve. They couldn 't have done it without Martin Luther King Jr., but there were a slew of cases that were tried and further assisted in opening the black community 's opportunity pool. They were well known cases, like the Plessy vs. Ferguson, Brown vs. Board of Education, and the Regents of the University vs. Bakke, all very influential cases in the fight for rights.

“Racism is man’s gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason” (Abraham Joshua Heschel). During the Jim Crow Era, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, African Americans never actually had fair trials because of the strong brutality and discrimination used against them. One specific example of a trial was the Plessy v. Ferguson case. Plessy refused to get off the train and broke the Separate Car Act which claimed that both black and white races needed to sit in their designated area on the train. Denying Ferguson’s wishes, Plessy was arrested and convicted to where he had to testify in court against Ferguson.

THE 14TH AMENDMENT In this paper, I will be talking about the equal protection of laws clause in 14th amendment interpreted in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. This paper will focus on the concern over racial injustice in the judgment of Plessy v. Ferguson. Racial injustice is being looked in several aspects i.e. the argument of absolute equality, the objection to inferiority argument, the personal liberty argument and the good faith argument. In the end, I will conclude that the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson is a pernicious decision.

This case surely affected the way the country would react in the years coming. I think the Civil Rights Movement indeed gained its momentum from this case and would eventually transform the United States acceptance to the diversity in the

Supreme Court Decisions Setting Precedent Discrimination may not seen as big a problem today, but people had to fight for that problem, and court cases set precedents for today. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson and Brown versus Board of Education helped change the way we view discrimination today. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson decided that segregation was legal as long as everything was equal. But on the other hand, Brown versus Board of Education included separate but equal schools made African-American children feel inferior to the white children. 1896, Supreme Court heard the Plessy versus Ferguson case.

For nearly a century, the United States was occupied by the racial segregation of black and white people. The constitutionality of this “separation of humans into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life” had not been decided until a deliberate provocation to the law was made. The goal of this test was to have a mulatto, someone of mixed blood, defy the segregated train car law and raise a dispute on the fairness of being categorized as colored or not. This test went down in history as Plessy v. Ferguson, a planned challenge to the law during a period ruled by Jim Crow laws and the idea of “separate but equal” without equality for African Americans. This challenge forced the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation, and in result of the case, caused the nation to have split opinions of support and

This case was extremely important and made is so children of all races could attend the same schools. This decision affected the Criminal Justice system as well as society as a whole and allows people to live they way they do

This case was not just an event in history, but a strong point that supported and still supports equality to this day. People can use this case to help support their reasoning for what they believe in and why certain actions should

The ruling thus lent high judicial support to racial and ethnic discrimination and led to wider spread of the segregation between Whites and Blacks in the Southern United States. The great oppressive consequence from this was discrimination against African American minority from the socio-political opportunity to share the same facilities with the mainstream Whites, which in most of the cases the separate facilities for African Americans were inferior to those for Whites in actuality. The doctrine of “separate but equal” hence encourages two-tiered pluralism in U.S. as it privileged the non-Hispanic Whites over other racial and ethnic minority

Freedom. The importance of freedom is often forgotten as Americans live day by day taking this gift for granted. In this day and age, freedom seems as a “simple gift’ obtained by every American, but one forgets to think about those who were once unable to enjoy the freedoms one is promised daily. Back in the day, freedom seemed as nothing more than a dream to those of color. Everyday of a colored person’s life consisted of harassment and discrimination as no one cared to treat them as equals.

For the next few months, the African American students attended school under armed supervision. Even so, they faced physical and verbal abuse from their white peers’’(Source B).This demonstrates how people got together and protested along with the African American students on how the segregationists were being racist and treating them like they were nonexistent. This also shows how the segregationists were ignoring the fact that others were disagreeing with them, but they were mainly focused on being inconsiderate and treating the ‘’Little Rock Nine’’ poorly because they were Negros. After All, the Little Rock Showdown displayed how the segregationists treated the Negro students unequally because they were just as qualified to go to school with white