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Plessy v. Ferguson
5 articles on Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson and Segregation
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1272 Includes: BibliographyThe Civil War and Reconstruction brought a measure of success to African Americans in their quest for equality. By the 1890s, however, Jim Crow segregation was enforced in states across the South. Fueling this wave of racial ill-treatment was the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the Civil Rights Act of 1875was unconstitutional. The Court now held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited unequal treatment by state authorities but not by private businesses. In effect blacks could be lawfully excluded from theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Louisiana was one of the few southern states in which blacks organized to block passage of discriminatory laws. Like other states, Louisiana was committed to white supremacy and racial segregation, and it passed the so-called separate-car law in ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1204 Includes: BibliographyLandmark case of 1896 in which the United States Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that permitted state-imposed racial segregation despite the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1892, thirty-year-old shoemaker Homer Plessy refused to leave his seat on a train in New Orleans, Louisiana, beginning a legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court's decision in this case, Plessy v. Ferguson, four years later permitted states to institute racially separate public accommodations. It would take nearly sixty years for the Court to reverse itself in a series of decisions beginning with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that overturned the judicial precedent for segregation. In Gayle v. Browder (1956), ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 584(1896). Supreme Court decision upholding racial segregation. The state of Louisiana in 1890 required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” The railroads objected to the legislation because of the additional cost it imposed in providing separate cars. The Louisiana law, however, had little to do with economic efficiency; instead, it represented an attempt by white legislators to restrict racial mixing. In response, a group of Creoles and African Americans in New Orleans organized the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a person who was one-eighth black and therefore appeared to be white, agreed to test the law. Plessy purchased a ticket on a train traveling solely within the state of Louisiana and ...
Read full articlePlessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
Source: The Oxford Companion to American Law
Word Count: 650The case of Plessy v. Ferguson placed the Supreme Court’s judicial stamp of approval on the emerging Jim Crow segregation system in the South. Until Plessy, the Court had distinguished between state action and individual acts of discrimination, maintaining that the federal government could protect the rights of black citizens in cases of discriminatory state laws. Now the Court adopted a formalistic logic that allowed some appearance of impartiality while ignoring the reality of the situation. Segregation laws, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the Court, did not “necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.” If blacks considered such laws discriminatory, it was only because they chose to look at them that way.Plessymade its way to the Supreme Court as a deliberate1890 ...
Read full articlePlessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Word Count: 10532Immediately after the Civil War, southern states began writing “Black Codes” into their laws in order maintain the civil, legal, and political supremacy of whites. Three “Reconstruction Amendments” were added to the U.S. Constitution in order to prevent this. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted African Americans citizenship; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave black men the right to vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 went further, legislating equal access to public facilities.By the 1880s, however, the reaction to equal rights made itself felt. In 1883 the Supreme Court opened the door by declaring the 1875 Act unconstitutional. States immediately began to segregate their schools. Four years later Florida was the first state to pass a law ...
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