1896: Plessy Upholds Segregation

On This Day in Politics: May 18, 1896

On May 18, 1896, the United States Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s requirement for racially segregated railroad accommodations in Plessy v. Ferguson. The decision accepted the doctrine commonly known as separate but equal, giving constitutional support to a system of enforced racial separation. It arose from a deliberate challenge organized in New Orleans, where Homer Plessy had refused to leave a railcar reserved for white passengers. The Court’s judgment rejected that challenge and became an important foundation for Jim Crow. Although the dispute concerned train travel, its consequences reached far beyond the railroad, shaping the legal environment in which segregation operated for decades.

Louisiana’s Separate Car Act had prompted organized opposition among Black residents of New Orleans. In 1891, the Citizens’ Committee formed to test the measure against the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection. Plessy volunteered for the planned case. On June 7, 1892, he bought a ticket for a journey to Covington and entered a white-designated compartment on the East Louisiana Railroad. The railroad cooperated with the test, and a private detective was arranged in advance to make the arrest when Plessy refused to move. This was a coordinated act of civil resistance, designed to bring the constitutionality of the law before the courts rather than an unplanned disagreement between a passenger and conductor.

The case moved through Louisiana’s courts before reaching the Supreme Court, which heard argument in April 1896. Justice Henry Brown wrote the majority opinion sustaining the state law. The majority treated legally required separation as compatible with constitutional equality and rejected the contention that it necessarily imposed inferior status. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented. He argued that the law interfered with citizens’ personal liberty and placed people in a position of legal inferiority on the basis of race. Their disagreement concerned the meaning of the constitutional guarantees adopted after slavery: whether government could enforce racial separation while claiming to provide equal rights. The majority’s answer allowed that contradiction to remain embedded in law.

The decision did not create racial discrimination, but it strengthened the legal defense of state segregation. Challenging that system required continuing community action and litigation long after Plessy’s defeat. In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court rejected separate but equal in public education, holding that segregated schools denied equal protection even when physical facilities were comparable. Further civil rights struggles and federal legislation addressed segregation in other settings. May 18 is therefore remembered as a major setback in the pursuit of equality, as well as evidence of the organized resistance that preceded later victories. The people behind the test case had challenged a system that the nation’s highest court chose to sustain.