In 1890, the railroad took actions towards providing transportation but both whites and blacks. During that year, Louisiana passed a statue called the Separate Car Act. The Separate Car Act stated that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in the state, shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations. If you disobeyed this rule by sitting in the wrong spot, you would be written a twenty-five dollar fine or twenty days in jail. A group of blacks raised over three thousand dollars to challenge the act. They chose Homer Plessy, a …show more content…
citizen that was one-eighth black and a resident of Louisiana. On June 7, 1892, he purchased a ticket and sat in the designated whites only car. The railroad workers then questioned Plessy why he was sitting in the whites only section when he was black. They then arrested him for violating the Separate Car Act. Many other buildings and transportation had the separation of blacks and whites. Schools, restrooms, and other public facilities were separated in to two, one for the whites and one for the blacks.
In the court case, Plessy argued that the act violated amendments of the constitution. He argued that it disagreed with the Thirteenth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. In the Thirteenth Amendment it states that, “ Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment of a crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Fourteenth Amendment said that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State where in they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law, which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. During court, John Howard Ferguson was the judge and he declared that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated solely within the state of …show more content…
Louisiana. Ferguson found Plessy guilty and declared the Separate Car Act constitutional. Throughout the process, Plessy mentioned that “separate” facilities for black and whites would be considered constitutional as long as they were “equal”. A doctrine named the “separate but equal” was extended to cover other public facilities such as restaurants, theatres, schools and restrooms.
After the doctrine was extended, many other strict laws were passed to forcefully separate blacks from whites in every sector of life. Education, restrooms, hotels, public transportation, sports, hospitals, prisons and even cemeteries were strictly separated depending on your color. Some cities often set 10:00 pm curfews for blacks and forbid them to vote. According to this argument, outlawing segregation would not eliminate racial prejudice because of the society’s beliefs could not be changed just because a law was issued. Racism still happens in the twenty first century. Although many laws are made to reduce and quit discrimination, that doesn’t change people’s minds. In 2014, a discrimination case was made public news. White Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department confronted a black teenage boy named Michael Brown then shot six times at the boy. The officer had no reason to shoot this teenage boy. The boy was killed within just three minutes. He had been shot twice in the head and four times in his right
arm. The black population blew this case out of proportion and argued that Officer Wilson killed him on purpose because he was black. After all the questioning Officer Darren Wilson came out and said that,” I let his racism get in his way while controlling a gun and I had no control over my feelings and beliefs.” Other cases that deal with discrimination still happen today but are often not made public news. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision was a major set back in race relations. It over exaggerated and intensified the separation of blacks and whites. The “separate but equal” doctrine sanctioned discrimination and unequal opportunities for more than fifty years. As long as separate public facilities were qualitatively equal, the Constitution did not prohibit segregation in the point of view of majority of the Court.
This case was brought to the Supreme Court with Plessey’s argument being that his 13th and 14th Amendments was being violated. But Louisiana argued that the 14th Amendment states that everyone is to be treated equally and that is exactly what happened. They said that the cars were separate but equal and that abided by the Constitution while keeping the Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court decided that no law was violated and took the state’s side. The Court upheld Plessey’s conviction, and ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to “equal facilities,” not the “same facilities.” In this ruling, the Supreme Court created the principle of “separate but equal,”(“Judicial Review”,
The history behind this case is just as important as the case itself. In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act which forced all railroad companies to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and nonwhite passengers. If someone sat in the wrong section, the punishment was a fine of $25 or 20 days in jail. A group called the Citizens Committee, made of mostly black activists decided to challenge the law. To prove the unconstitutionality of the law they created a plan and Homer Plessy was chosen go against the segregationists by disobeying the law.
Plessy v. Ferguson was the first major inquiry into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, which prohibits states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions. Although the majority opinion did not contain the phrase separate but equal, it gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate and supposedly equal public facilities and services for African Americans and whites. It served as a controlling judicial precedent until it was overturned by the ...
The court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson created nationwide controversy in the United States due to the fact that its outcome would ultimately affect every citizen of our country. On Tuesday, June 7th, 1892, Mr. Homer Plessy purchased a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad for a trip from New Orleans to Covington. He then entered a passenger car and took a vacant seat in a coach where white passengers were also sitting. There was another coach assigned to people who weren’t of the white race, but this railroad was a common carrier and was not authorized to discriminate passengers based off of their race. (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus”).Mr. Plessy was a “Creole of Color”, a person who traces their heritage back to some of the Caribbean, French, and Spanish who settled into Louisiana before it was part of the US (“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow”). Even though Plessy was only one eighth African American, and could pass for a full white man, still he was threatened to be penalized and ejected from the train if he did not vacate to the non-white coach (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus). In ...
While Jim Crow was blatantly incongruent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the full benefits of citizenry, it was justified by the Plessy vs. Ferguson Case of 1896 in which the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, requiring racially segregated railroad facilities, under the condition that such facilities were equal. This “separate but equal” doctrine was quickly, and legally, applied t...
Because of the 13th and 14th Amendments freeing slaves and granting equal protection under the law grants Jon the same rights to ride the train as any other citizen. Santa Clara County v. Southern Public Railroad, Even though the case was not about the 14th Amendment, Justice Morrison Remick Waite made it so by arguing that corporations must comply with the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Public Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886). Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy sat in a whites-only train car, he was asked to move to the car reserved for blacks, because state law mandated segregation. The court held that segregation is not necessarily unlawful discrimination as long as the races are treated equally. The impact of Plessy was to relegate blacks to second-class citizenship. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). However, this is not equal
During the four decades following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen for full citizenship rights were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites—totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
The legality of racial segregation was the result of a deeply flawed belief held by the majority of Americans that blacks were inherently inferior and would never be treated the same as whites. African Americans had been regarded as property for centuries prior to the Civil Rights Movement, and that mindset had to be changed for the creation of new laws or abolition of old laws to have any ...
In 1887, Jim Crow Laws started to arise, and segregation became rooted into the way of life of southerners (“Timeline”). Then in 1890, Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Act.” This forced rail companies to provide separate rail cars for minorities and majorities. If a minor sat in the wrong car, it cost them $25 or 20 days in jail. Because of this, an enraged group of African American citizens had Homer Plessy, a man who only had one eighth African American heritage, purchase a ticket and sit in a “White only” car on June 7, 1892.
Ferguson trial was a court case about a black man by the name of Homer Adolph Plessy. He was arrested for refusing to not ride in the ‘colored’ railway coach. Plessy had enough of the segregation so he decided to sit up in the white coach. However, it didn’t go well for him and he was arrested. On February 23, 1869, the Louisiana legislature passed a law prohibiting segregation on public transportation. The Government used the term ‘separate but equal’ as an excuse for not letting the blacks sit up with the whites. The supreme court case of Plessy v. Ferguson upheld a ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. “Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contract do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other. (Plessy v. Ferguson). So the blacks and white were now equal, but they couldn’t be together. The government said that the everything was equal when the school that the black children were in had old textbooks when the white school had new textbooks. The blacks and whites were separate but not so much
“Separate is not equal.” In the case of Plessey vs. Ferguson in 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court said racial segregation didn’t violate the Constitution, so racial segregation became legal. In 1954 the case of Oliver Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka this case proved that separate is not equal. Oliver Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka was revolutionary to the education system, because colored people and Caucasians had segregated schools. The Caucasians received a better education and the colored people argued that they were separate but not equal. This would pave the way for integrated schools and change the education system as we knew it.
“Separate but equal” facilities should be unconstitutional because it violated the 13th and 14th Amendment and everyone was created equally, so no race should be separated from another race. In my opinion, Homer Plessy never violated any law or did anything that was wrong as well as how “separate but equal” facilities were unconstitutional. Harlan once said, “Everyone knows that the statues in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons. “
Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation in the United States was commonly practiced in many of the Southern and Border States. This segregation while supposed to be separate but equal, was hardly that. Blacks in the South were discriminated against repeatedly while laws did nothing to protect their individual rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ridded the nation of this legal segregation and cleared a path towards equality and integration. The passage of this Act, while forever altering the relationship between blacks and whites, remains as one of history’s greatest political battles.
In the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson the courts saw that the train carts were separate and equal because they
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