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