Scottsboro Trial Case Study

Plessy v. Ferguson , a very important case of 1896 in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the legality of racial segregation. At the time of the ruling, segregation between blacks and whites already existed in most schools, restaurants, and other public facilities in the American South. In the Plessy decision, the Supreme Court ruled that such segregation did not violate the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. This amendment provides equal protection of the law to all U.S. citizens, regardless of race. The court ruled in Plessy that racial segregation was legal as long as the separate facilities for blacks and whites were “equal.”

Blacks fought against discrimination whenever possible. In the late 1800s blacks sued in courts to put an end to separate seating in railroad cars, states disfranchisement of voters, and denial of access to schools and restaurants. One of the cases against segregation was Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that separate but equal accommodations were constitutional.

This landmark ruling in the Scottsboro case, Powell v. Alabama was named after one of the nine defendants. This was the case that drove the Constitution to

One of the most historic cases in Supreme Court history is the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. Plessy v. Ferguson was a trial that ruled segregation as legal, as long as separate, equal facilities were provided for both races. After the Reconstruction era had dispersed, the Jim Crow laws appeared. The Separate Car Act was one of the Jim Crow laws enacted upon by the Louisiana State Legislature. This law stated that blacks and whites

vs. Sanford was a catalyst to riots, other court cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education, Rachel vs. Walker and

The landmark Supreme Court cases of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas have had a tremendous effect on the struggle for equal rights in America. These marker cases have set the precedent for cases dealing with the issue of civil equality for the last 150 years.

The Dred Scott Case occurred when a slaves master passed away. Dred Scott (the slave) was owned by a doctor who lived in a free state so, he acted like a free man. When the doctor died Dred Scott was in his will for his wife, his wife ended up moving to a slave state but Dred Scott got a lawyer top try to sue her for treating him like a slave. He was the first salve ever to try to sue his master. The judge, Roger Taney, basically said that a black man had no right while white can do as they please. This case caused an uproar in the North and drove the wedge between the North and the South even deeper than ever before. This case proved to the North that the government was not opposed to

The Plessy versus Ferguson case started with an incident where an African American passenger on a train, Homer Plessy, broke Louisiana law by refusing to sit in a Jim Crow car, a separate cart on the train where African Americans had to sit. This

In 1896, the court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson ruled that the states had the right to legally segregate public facilities. This court ruling fueled the fire of Southerners in regards to race relations, leading to the Jim Crow laws. These laws went as far as to say blacks could not cut a white person’s hair, drink from the same water fountain as a white person, and established a test for blacks to take prior to getting a ballot.

The case, Gomillion V. Lightfoot of 1960, the Alabama legislature tried to ban African Americans from voting. The way they did this was they redrew the electoral district boundaries of Tuskegee, to exclude all African Americans from city limits and place them in a different district. Their ultimate goal was to deprive African Americans of political power. The Court found the Alabama legislature violating the Fifteenth Amendment and found guilty with one idea in mind and that was to deprive African Americans from political power.This helped the Civil rights movement closer to their voting rights

Just two years after the death of Charles Houston, segregation/Jim Crow was finally put to the test in the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education. The case began when Reverend Brown and various NAACP members fought to put their children in the close white schools, which led to Brown v. Board of Education. On December 9, 1952, the case was in effect and for seventeen months segregation hung in the balance.

After the Civil War, the Unites States became segregated with African Americans behind white folks. Many people, especially, African Americans, did not like segregation and tried to get rid of it. Many had campaigns trying to win other people over to help them get rid of segregation, but they usually did not work. However, five communities decided to go to the courts. They wanted their children of color, to be able to learn as well as the white people. Then, in 1954, the court got rid of segregation in one school and changed history forever.

An important Supreme Court Cases for this was Powell vs Alabama. The case was about a group of young black men, "the Scottsboro Boys", who were on a freight train with seven white men and two women. The women accused the black men of rape, although one of the women later retracted her claim. All the defendants, except for

One of the cases against segregated rail travel was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional. However, in 1952, the Supreme Court heard a number of school-segregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Topeka, Kansas. It decided unanimously in 1954 that segregation was unconstitutional, overthrowing the 1869 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had set the "separate but equal" precedent.

A very well known dispute that The Supreme Court had to deal with is Plessy v. Ferguson. On June 7, 1892 a thirty year old man by the name of Homer Plessy was detained for sitting in the 'white” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was very light complected, he could have been been thought out to be “white”. Despite his color completion, by law he was still considered to be “black”. Despite the dispute of his color completion he had to move back “where he belonged”, with the colored people. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessey deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black; therefore, he was then arrested. The case was very well known throughout the country that the case went all the way to the United States Supreme