1896 PLESSY V. FERGUSON AND JIM CROW OUTLINE • Plessy v. Ferguson and segregation • Remembering Jim Crow • Crime and Punishment • Lynching • Booker T. Washington PLESSY V. FERGUSON (1896) 1890: Louisiana passes Separate Car Act requiring “equal but separate” carriages for railway passengers 1891: Citizens Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law established by a group of African-American activists in New Orleans 1892: Homer Plessy (7/8 white, but considered “colored”) arrested for sitting in a white compartment 1896: Case considered by U.S. Supreme Court • Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Fourteenth Amendment • Majority decision ruled that Separate Car Act was constitutional Ruling set the legal precedent that “separate” facilities were constitutional as long as they were “equal” – quickly extended to cover many other areas of public life in the South e.g. restaurants, theatres, schools. PLESSY V. FERGUSON (MAJORITY OPINION) “A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races. ... The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." PLESSY V. FERGUSON (DISSENT) “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. ... The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.” BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856 – 1915) • Born into slavery in Virginia • Educated at Hampton Institute • Founding leader of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama • Won the trust of white Southerners and Northern philanthropists to make Tuskegee a model school of industrial education ADDRESS AT ATLANTA EXPOSITION (1895) Invited to speak on race relations before a predominately white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition Speech was an articulation of his educational philosophy and “accomodationist” strategy Publicly accepted disenfranchisement and social segregation, as long as whites would allow black economic progress, educational opportunity and justice in the courts • Argued that economic progress should precede full political equality • Argued that equality was achieved through hard work and self-improvement