Finding a mixed-race passenger who looked white was a central element in the New Orleans committee’s legal strategy. Mallie said her uncle, “an out-and-out abolitionist,” would “rather have seen me in my grave than have me marry a Southern man” (p.33).
[23] The Court rejected this argument: We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. Born in Maryland about 1817.
They follow a string of earlier rulings, and they precede a fresh set of issues that can sometimes be foreseen but never guaranteed. Q. Was Brown reflecting the North’s exhaustion with the “Negro question,” as it was frequently called in public debates? Only three of the early Massachusetts railroads chose to run separate cars? But ask about even the basic facts, and the likely reaction is a blank stare. He had planned for it, imagined it, played out the scene over and over in his mind’s eye, calibrating and recalibrating every detail. He was unfamiliar with the court’s practice of notifying only the local counsel about the scheduling of a case. [21] Next, the Court considered whether the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which reads: "nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." As I write in the Prologue, Plessy is a reminder that history is made, not ordained. So many choices out there.
[21] According to the Court, the question in any case of racial segregation laws like Plessy was whether the law was reasonable, and the Court gave great discretion to State legislatures to determine the reasonableness of the laws they passed.[21]. [26], In an eloquent and now well-known passage, Harlan argued that even if many white Americans of the late 19th century considered themselves socially superior to Americans of other races, the U.S. Constitution was "color-blind", and could not permit any classes among citizens in matters of civil rights.[27]. Separate pulls that thread through the narrative. The material on this site can not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Multiply. The people who fought for equal rights in that era, many of them, were heroic. Plessy was convicted and sentenced to pay a $25 fine. They and their ancestors had been free at the time of the American takeover. Lynching, already a weapon of vengeance and vigilante justice in the years before the Plessy decision, became a signature tool for whites bent on domination and repression. I allude to the Chinese race.
Born in Louisiana, 1837; served in the Confederate Army. The amendments abolished slavery, confirmed citizenship for all native-born Americans, established the concept of equal protection regardless of color or race, and extended voting rights to black men. The prospect of greater state influence in matters of race worried numerous advocates of civil equality, including Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, who wrote in his Plessy dissent, "we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law, when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master. Equality before the law, unconstitutionality of separate colored schools in Massachusetts: argument of Charles Sumner, Esq., before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the case of Sarah C. Roberts vs. the city of Boston, December 4, 1849, F. & J. Rives & Geo. The marriage of Albion and Emma Tourgée was unusual for the period. [3][4] The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). A. [50], In 2009 a marker was placed[12] at the corner of Press and Royal Streets, near where Plessy had boarded his train.
A. Here’s what I discovered: Segregation is a Twentieth Century word. The Court ruled 7-1 that the Louisiana law requiring that the races be separated did not violate the 13th or 14th amendments to the Constitution as long as the facilities were deemed equal. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it. Q. [51], "Plessy" redirects here. ", Although a small minority of black Bostonians favored a separate school, where their children would be protected from abuse, the drive for integration gained momentum. Nell, Morris, and others turned to the legislature; in 1855 they won passage of a law that forbid public schools from making distinction "on account of race, color, or religious opinions" when a student sought admission. If the oral arguments in the Supreme Court lawsuit known as Plessy v. Ferguson had taken place the day before, then Tourgée had missed perhaps the most important oration of his career, one he had spent more than three years preparing to give. All Rights Reserved. Plessy took on greater importance after the Supreme Court reversed itself in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, saying separate is inherently unequal and singling out Plessy as the court’s wrong turn. He conceded that all citizens should have "equality before the law," as Sumner had argued, but this did not mean that there could not be separate schools for black children. How did you organize a narrative that extends over fifty years and pulls in so many characters?
Here the facts are plain and unanswerable, showing a palpable violation of Equality. Fing, The Washington Independent Review of Books, “. Resisters in New Orleans set about devising a test case. Only then would he have any hope of persuading the court’s Northerners that this case was different, that separate was not equal, could never be equal—at least not when a Southern legislature was deploying a law to promote the desires and interests of one race at the expense of another. The press didn’t give it big coverage, mostly because the court had already accepted separation in its 1890 ruling upholding Mississippi’s separate car law. The Plessy case was a knife that cleaved America, and Steve Luxenberg brilliantly reveals that divide with his rich narrative of admirable and flawed characters caught in the battle over racial justice.
Take, for example, perhaps the two most important Supreme Court opinions in the past 100 years: The case that created the 'Separate but equal' doctrine and the case that abolished the doctrine as it applied to the federal government and the states. Born in Ohio, 1838; moved to North Carolina, 1865; returned to the North, 1879. 15. [12] After Plessy took a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it, and sit instead in the blacks-only car. Why do you say “separation,” rather than segregation? Do you agree? Most of the faculty was white, and many of the teachers were poorly prepared. Historians and constitutional scholars certainly have written about the case, particularly the legal ramifications. Q. [19] The state legal brief was prepared by Attorney General Milton Joseph Cunningham of Natchitoches and New Orleans.
Had Brown fought for the Union during the war, rather than hiring a substitute, do you think he would have been so keen to meet Davis? “I have been ready for the hearing for three months, waiting every day to know when it would probably be reached,” he thundered, “but have never heard a word from you.”, With a characteristic flush of hyperbole, he rushed on. Perhaps most of all, both found a good fight hard to resist. Unlike Gideon’s Trumpet or Simple Justice, his story does not end with a judicial triumph. He was fifty- seven years old, with a glass eye to replace the one blinded in a boyhood gun accident. Their previous writings suggested no resolute position on racial equality. [21] It held that as long as a law that classified and separated people by their race was a reasonable and good faith exercise of a State's police power—and was not designed to oppress a particular class—the law was legal. As the lone dissenter in Plessy, Harlan cemented his reputation as a clarion voice for fairness and equal protection. However, the judge presiding over his case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies while they operated within state boundaries. I would say the Supreme Court “endorsed” or “sanctioned” the idea that separate could be equal. … this consideration cannot be neglected, the matters taught in the two schools may be precisely the same; but a school exclusively devoted to one class, must differ essentially in spirit and character from that Common School known to the law, where all classes meet together in Equality. Why or why not?
Martinet was furious when Douglass declined.
Remarkable characters populate the landscape of this one: Tourgée of Ohio, Brown of New England, Harlan of Kentucky, Martinet of Louisiana, on separate paths to a shared destination, connected by time, culture, happenstance, and the unresolved struggle between an exhausted North and a bitter South. He had done more than anticipate this moment. In addition, parents charged that the white man who served as headmaster from 1833 to 1844 held "opinions of the intellectual character of the colored race of people that disqualify him to be a teacher of colored children. This contradicted the vague declaration of "separate but equal" institutions issued after the Plessy decision. In 1850 Boston's public schools were the only ones in Massachusetts that were still segregated. The committee’s leaders couldn’t believe their good fortune in having a man of Tourgée’s stature on their side. In the late nineteenth century, many state courts would refer to the decision in denying black children access to white schools. The Plessy case underscores a central fact about the Supreme Court: Its decisions cannot be viewed in isolation.
A year before the Civil War, several Louisiana newspapers wrote approvingly of new laws designed to push free people of color into leaving the state for good. In 1855, in Michigan, William Day sued a steamboat that had refused to sell him a ticket for an inside cabin, saying those quarters were for whites only. Separate railroad cars and separate schools became separate bathrooms and separate water fountains. Born in Massachusetts, 1838; moved to New Orleans, 1866. Just like the people swept up in the case, the story behind Plessy is neither plain nor simple. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. The black and white are not equal before the law. Would your skin color have affected your answer? Which is a greater factor in Albion’s character, his ego or his evolving anger at the way people of color were treated? In 1883, Frederick Douglass implored a National Convention of Colored Men to take strong action against the color line, and not settle into a “servile and cowardly submission” to bigotry” (p. 362). HS Unit I: Free But Far From Equal: The African American Experience in Massachusetts, 1780–1863, Lesson A: The Struggle for Racial Justice, 1780-1863, Activity 1: Starting With What Students Know, Activity 2: Exploring the Mass Moments Website for Answers, Lesson B: Men and Women, Black and White, Who Made a Difference, Activity 1: Interviewing Anti-Slavery Activists, Lesson C: The Fight for Equal Education, 1800–1855: Two Case Studies of School Desegregation. little nigger[s]." Renamed the Smith School in honor of its benefactor, the school was incorporated into the Boston school system. 10. [43], The separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African-American community were consistently inferior[45] to those provided to the White community. Not by a long shot. Was it possible for him to bring others along this time? We hear the phrase “civil rights,” and we immediately think of the 1960s.