Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 13, 1896 Decided May 18, 1896
Full case name	Homer A. Plessy v. John H. Ferguson
Citations	163 U.S. 537 (more) 16 S. Ct. 1138; 41 L. Ed. 256; 1896 U.S. LEXIS 3390
Decision	Opinion
Case history
Prior	Ex parte Plessy, 11 So. 948 (La. 1892)
Subsequent	None
Holding
The "separate but equal" provision of private services mandated by state law is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
Court membership
Chief Justice Melville Fuller Associate Justices Stephen J. Field · John M. Harlan Horace Gray · David J. Brewer Henry B. Brown · George Shiras Jr. Edward D. White · Rufus W. Peckham
Case opinions
Majority	Brown, joined by Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham
Dissent	Harlan
Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. XIII, XIV; 1890 La. Acts No. 111, p. 152, § 1
Overruled by
(de facto) Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and subsequent rulings[1]

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Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for African-Americans^[2] were equal in quality to those of white people, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal".^[3][4] The decision legitimized the many state "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the South lasted into the 1960s.

The underlying case began in 1892 when Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans. By boarding the whites-only car, Plessy violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which required "equal, but separate" railroad accommodations for white and black passengers.^[5] Plessy was charged under the Act, and at his trial his lawyers argued that judge John Howard Ferguson should dismiss the charges on the grounds that the Act was unconstitutional. Ferguson denied the request, and the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Ferguson's ruling on appeal. Plessy then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In May 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision against Plessy, ruling that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment established the legal equality of whites and blacks, it did not and could not require the elimination of all "distinctions based upon color". The Court rejected Plessy's lawyers' arguments that the Louisiana law inherently implied that black people were inferior, and gave great deference to American state legislatures' inherent power to make laws regulating health, safety, and morals—the "police power"—and to determine the reasonableness of the laws they passed. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter from the Court's decision, writing that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens", and so the laws distinguishing races should have been found unconstitutional.

Plessy is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history.^[6] Despite its infamy, the decision has never been explicitly overruled.^[7] However, beginning in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, which held that the "separate but equal" doctrine is unconstitutional in the context of public schools, a series of the Court's later decisions have severely weakened Plessy to the point that it is considered to have been de facto overruled.^[8]