Homer Plessy v. John H. Ferguson – 1896
In the years leading up to the American Civil War, pro-slavery factions justified the use of a slave labor force. To ensure equal legislative power between slave states and non-slave states, Congress stated that slaves were 3/5 of a person. Southern states with large slave populations were permitted to count their slaves as 3/5 of a person, thus increasing a state’s population, which in turn increased the number of state representatives in Congress.
As the abolition movement gained support, the ideology of race began to play a more important role in determining who should be enslaved. Applying the French idea of purity of blood meant that anyone with one drop of African blood in them could be enslaved. For Americans the mixed-race babies that resulted from the forced sexual encounters between white masters and black slave women would be slaves even though they were half white. After the American Civil War ended, the one-drop rule had more of an impact on social order and helped solidify Jim Crow.
Mixed-race children were not new in the South. Mary Chestnut noted in her diary that plantation wives were constantly reminded of the liberty their husbands took with their slaves by the mixed-race slave children working in their homes. Some benevolent masters sent their racially mixed children to schools in the North like Wilberforce University in Ohio. Most were sold to neighboring plantations, or worse, at the suggestion of plantation mistresses.
As the lines between white and black blurred after the American Civil War, new tactics had to be used. Before a former Confederate state could be re-admitted to the Union, they had to draft a new state constitution and obtain the approval of Congress. Additionally, the southern states had to ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The former rebellious southern states had new state constitutions that reflected the ideals of the United States Constitution. This lasted until the 1890s, when Southern Democrats were permitted back in Congress.
In the aftermath of Reconstruction, southern states had been working on ways to separate the races. Municipal and state laws restricted the mixing of the races in public accommodations such as train stations, restrooms, and schools. When trains entered into southern states, the private companies forced black passengers, no matter their ticket, into the segregated train cars. Interstate train operators and owners did not like adding extra train cars at their own cost to accommodate the laws of southern states. For black passengers, refusing to move could result in violence and expulsion from the train in hostile and often Ku Klux Klan controlled territory.
Homer Plessy was a Creole whose family spoke French and had lived in New Orleans for generations. A small citizens’ community of Creoles, blacks, and whites devised a plan in September 1891 to challenge the separate accommodation laws. They recruited a white lawyer, Albion Winegar Tourgée, who continually advocated for freedman rights and education. To question the arbitrary nature of how southern officials determined who was white and who was black, he suggested that a mixed-race person break the law. Plessy would be the offender and he was arrested in June 1892 for riding in the white car on an interstate train.
Plessy was fined $25 for failing to move to the segregated rail car. He refused and his lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana. The state’s supreme court upheld the lower court’s ruling. Undaunted, Plessy’s case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court in 1896. Standing in front of the US Supreme Court, Tourgée argued that the Thirteenth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the same rights to all citizens regardless of race.
In a 7-1 decision, the US Supreme Court stated that the Louisiana law did not infringe upon the rights of Plessy as outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court stated that Louisiana’s law merely kept the races segregated as a matter of public policy, making public accommodations separate but equal. The Plessy decision allowed southern states to enact separate but equal laws, which ushered in the era of Jim Crow. Over the next several decades, numerous lawsuits were filed challenging the legality of the enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the South and de facto segregation in the North and West.