The Plessy v. Ferguson and the Brown v. The Board of Education Cases

In 1890 the Louisiana General Assembly passed legislation that decreed separate but equal “accommodations” for individuals including white, black, and mulatto’s. In the minds of blacks, this signaled a return to the Jim Crow laws of control and were not acceptable. The General Assembly deemed this law to be reasonable with the intentions of restoring peace and order to their state; noncompliance with this edict included hefty fines, imprisonment, or both.

In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a statue called the separate car act requiring “all railways companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state shall provide equal but separate accommodations for white, and colored races”.

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix" (Rank, 2010). The case eventually went to the United States Supreme Court, after the initial ruling was upheld in the Virginia Supreme Court, and the decision was reversed. This paper looks at the arguments for both sides of the issue, and then argues why this was a landmark case of the type.

Racism began back in the 1600s, and hundreds of years later it is still a relevant issue. After slavery was ended and African Americans were given some rights, problems began to build up. These problems led to the many cases that dealt with segregation, discrimination, and racism. These two cases dealt with these issues and the decisions changed America forever. Cases go to court everyday, but those cases can't compare to the influence made by the cases Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. The Board of Education.

In the year of 1890 Louisiana passed the Louisiana separate car act which mandated separate accommodations for Black and White railroad passengers.This all began when the state of Florida began to require that railroads furnish separate accommodations for each race. These measures were uncommon as railway companies that bore the expense of adding Jim Crow cars.

“Every right implies a responsibility; Every opportunity, an obligation, Every possession, a duty.” (John D. Rockefeller)

1890: Louisiana passed law requiring railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.”

Thank you for your post. I enjoyed reading your post. I too find this branch interesting because this is the branch that we as people have the most interaction with. I find this branch to also be the most critical because this were the most change happens. Examples of this are the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 or the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. These were two major supreme court case that changed history. Being someone who works in the health care field, I believe that at some point in time the supreme court will have to make a ruling on how healthcare policy is executed to keep it ethical and to ensure the everyone gets there needs met.

In 1892 a man by the name of Homer Plessy was traveling in a train. There was one problem though, Homer Plessy was not in the “Jim Crow” car. The Jim Crow car was a railroad car that only blacks sat in. Homer Plessy was breaking a state law. According to the state law of Louisiana, it required all African Americans to ride in a separate car of the train. After being arrested, Homer Plessy argued that his constitutional rights were being violated. The constitutional

Although there were laws formed to “help” blacks from such hardships, these laws really put in power the sacred protection of white supremacy and the keeping of blacks’ oppressed but being of mixed race came with some better opportunities, but for others it was a battle.

Although the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s injunction forbid any state to make or enforce a law which abridged the privileges or immunities of any U.S. citizen, still the Court decided in 1873 that this only applied to the federal government. When Congress passed public accommodations acts in subsequent years, those were struck down by the Court, too. That paved the way for Louisiana in 1890 to adopt an act that required all railway companies carrying passengers to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races” (Hall, 2005, p. 739). This law said that passengers must sit in the sections designated for their race and there was a penalty that included jail time for any violation of this act.

Nella Larsen and Chester Himes both published novels in the first half of the twentieth century that deal with “Black” characters passing for “white.” Particularly because the race of some characters is fairly ambiguous in Larsen’s novel, members of the “Black race” as defined here will include those with any known Black ancestry. Therefore “race” is being defined with respect to the “one-drop” rule, which dictates that any small presence of African ancestry requires individuals to be granted a hypo-descendent racial status. This decision came about because both novels are set and were published during a time when legal racial status largely determined individuals’ economic power in order to maintain Jim Crow segregation (Davis 17-19).

In the circular case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, race was deemed to be both biological and social. Plessy viewed himself as a white man due to his genetical DNA attributes of his 7/8 Caucasian and 1/8 African. Unfornately to the white society he was viewed as black because he wasn’t a pure breed. He was arrested for sitting in the white area on the Railroad in the State of Louisiana. Plessy felt that his 13th and 14th amendments were violated. At the time of the Plessy decision the Supreme Court set the precedent that “separate” facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were “equal”, and he was fined for $25.00. This decision became known as the separate but equal doctrine, which led to the Jim Crow’s Law which was then stroked down by the Brown vs. Board of Education.

It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base” (Martin, 1991; p. 83). In particular, Jackson’s mention of both African American’s “land base” raises an important aspect to consider when discussing issues surrounding race. Genetic racial ancestry is rarely, if ever, monolithic. Considered at the most basic, biological level, children inherit race from their parents (Appiah, 2006). Race may originate with psychological and physical being, confining race to the body (Kawash, 1996). Though typically a biological referent, Carlson (1999) explains that “race” only sometimes adheres to biological lineage. Before 1989 in the United States the race written on a birth certificate was the race of the non-white parent. If both parents were not white, then it lists the assumed race of the father. After 1989, the race of the child is what the mother reports (Greenberg, 2002). Legal institutions and most scholars “have rejected these assumptions as they apply to race and now believe that race is not binary and it cannot be defined solely by biological factors” (Greenberg, 2002, p.103). For instance, the Supreme Court upheld that race is predominantly stipulated by social and legal institutions (Greenberg, 2002). Race as a linguistic term also frequently categorizes entire socioeconomic populations or cultures (Carlson, 1999). And in regards to racial categorization, Wright (2003) states that in the legal sense, most racial information is verified by the self-definition of the

In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act. This law stated that railroad companies in the state of Louisiana must separate Caucasian passengers from opposing races. This is where the term “separate but equal” came into play. “Separate but equal” laws were established when laws wouldn’t exclude accommodations to African Americans, but wouldn’t give them the fullest benefits either. For example: while a white