Plessy V Ferguson Quotes

It is often forgotten today that Plessy v. Ferguson was not an isolated Supreme Court decision. In case after case, the Court reaffirmed and upheld the ability of states to enforce apartheid.

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. 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 humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.

THE COMMON IDEA of claiming “color blindness” is akin to the notion of being “not racist”—as with the “not racist,” the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of color blindness—like the language of “not racist”—is a mask to hide racism. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America.

In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court declared de jure (by law) racial segregation legal, which caused it to spread in at least twelve northern states. In 1898, Democrats rioted in Wilmington, North Carolina, driving out the mayor and all the other Republican officeholders and killing at least twelve African Americans. The McKinley administration did nothing, allowing this coup d'etat to stand. Congress became desegregated in 1901 when Congressman George H. White of North Carolina failed to win reelection owing to the disfranchisement of black voters in his state. No African American served in Congress again until 1929, and none from the South until 1973.

When we pay attention to this history,  a pattern emerges: first,  the Redeemers attacked voting rights. Then they attacked public education, labor, fair tax policies, and progressive leaders. Then they took over the state and federal courts, so they could be used to render rulings that would undermine the hope of a new America. This effort culminated in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring segregation of public facilities under the doctrine "separate but equal." And then they made sure that certain elements had guns so that they could return the South back to the status quo ante, according to their deconstructive immoral philosophy.

The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.

In the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to clarify the existing racial classifications when it established the “one drop rule”—those with a single Black relative, no matter how distant, were considered Black, even if they appeared white—but this decision only muddled an already complicated issue.

The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon

In these postbellum decades, discriminatory Jim Crow laws came to dominate the South, and the North was home to both de jure and de facto segregation. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the racist principle of “separate but equal”; lynchings went on unabated, unprosecuted, and too little noted. “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men who held us as slaves,” said a formerly enslaved person. “The cry is delusive that slavery is dead,” George Bancroft had remarked in a eulogy for Lincoln. The formerly enslaved person and the historian-statesman were both right. White Americans remained firmly in control.

When we say that the Negro wants absolute and immediate freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today, the answer is disturbingly terse to people who are not certain they wish to believe it. Yet this is the fact. Negroes no longer are tolerant of or interested in compromise. American history is replete with compromise. As splendid as are the words of the Declaration of Independence, there are disquieting implications in the fact that the original phrasing was altered to delete a condemnation of the British monarch for his espousal of slavery. American history chronicles the Missouri Compromise, which permitted the spread of slavery to new states; the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which withdrew the federal troops from the South and signaled the end of Reconstruction; the Supreme Court' compromise in Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the infamous "separate but equal" philosophy. These measures compromised not only the liberty of the Negro but the integrity of America. In the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro in 1963, the word "compromise" is profane and pernicious.

Jim Crow was not merely about the physical separation of blacks and whites. Nor was segregation strictly about laws, despite historians' tendency to fix upon legal landmarks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In order to maintain dominance, whites needed more than the statutes and signs that specified "whites" and "blacks" only; they had to assert and reiterate black inferiority with every word and gesture, in every aspect of both public and private life. Noted theologian Howard Thurman dissected the "anatomy" of segregation with chilling precision in his classic 1965 book, The Luminous Darkness. A white supremacist society must not only "array all the forces of legislation and law enforcement, " he wrote; "it must falsify the facts of history, tamper with the insights of religion and religious doctrine, editorialize and slant news and the printed word. On top of that it must keep separate schools, separate churches, separate graveyards, and separate public accommodations-all this in order to freeze the place of the Negro in society and guarantee his basic immobility." Yet this was "but a partial indication of the high estimate" that the white South placed upon African Americans. "Once again, to state it categorically, " Thurman concludes, "the measure of a man's estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.

Under the banner of keeping the races apart, much of white America stood silent as black Americans suffered beatings, assaults, and murders.

Taft ended his opinion with an added clause, a statement so bold that it would rattle even his strongest supporters. The chief justice of the Supreme Court and former president of the United States gave individual states full constitutional power to segregate public schools and assign students to any race they saw fit: “The decision is within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Mississippi is affirmed.” Without the participation of any person of the Negro race, the Supreme Court rendered a decision that sanctioned racial segregation within all public schools. The Court’s unanimous ruling provided Mississippi with one of its strongest weapons to uphold segregation. A case that could have dismantled the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson now became a pillar for its defense.

This is the court of Plessy v. Ferguson, of Dred Scott and fugitive slave laws, of trying to suffocate the New Deal in the cradle, of gutting the power of the 14th Amendment won with the blood of so many Americans during the Civil War, of Japanese internment camps, of Muslim bans, of billionaires and corporations and political gerrymandering and gutting voting rights.

Can we really reform the court that gave us Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson, and has terrorized Black people for most of its history? Is trimming the green mold on a rotting piece of meat the answer, or do you find an entirely different means of sustenance?

The resurrection of Jacobson has been compared to “resurrecting Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, or Korematsu”—historical Supreme Court cases referred to as “anticanon” owing to not only their lack of intellectual rigor but to the awful human tragedies they precipitated.

culture—in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a very light-skinned, racially mixed man, had made a planned attempt to challenge Louisiana’s 1890 law requiring segregated streetcars. His lawyer, Albion Tourgee, a northern white Reconstruction official and popular novelist, had argued the case on the grounds that the government did not have the right to determine the racial identities of its citizens. But the Supreme Court decided

A white skin is the greatest blessing that has been enjoyed on American soil.

The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].” They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it. And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing? The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states. Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional. President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional. The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.

The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court gave legal sanction to segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, creating a standard of “separate but equal” that was anything but equal.

In May 1896, the thoughtful justices of the high court, men who help to clarify national standards for everyone, determine that "repellent intimacy" is a persuasive argument. The law of quarantine is affirmed. "We think the enforced separation of the races. . .neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws," writes associate justice Henry B. Brown in a 7-1 ruling. The main point, says Justice Brown, is that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts." The encirclement is complete. Race quarantine becomes the custom in all the land. White supremacy is acclaimed in habit, in thought and in law.

In 1896, in the seminal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with the South and ruled, in an eight-to-one vote, that “equal but separate” accommodations were constitutional. That ruling would stand for the next sixty years.

Unfettered by the Supreme Court, Jim Crow became the law of the South. When the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was announced, there were 130,334 registered Black voters in Louisiana. Eight years later, there were only 1,342.65 “Between the two dates the literacy, property, and poll tax qualifications were adopted,” wrote historian C. Vann Woodward in his 1955 book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. “In 1896, Negro registrants were in a majority in twenty-six parishes—by 1900, in none.”66

Consider Lochner v. New York,5 where the Court refused to find that the state’s police powers extended to protecting bakery employees against employers who required them to work in physically unhealthy conditions for more than 10 hours per day and 60 hours per week. Such maximum hour legislation, the Court held, would interfere with the bakers’ inherent freedom to make their own contracts with the employers on the best terms they could negotiate…. For blacks, of course, we can compare Lochner with the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.6 In that case, the Court upheld the state’s police power to segregate blacks in public facilities even though such segregation must, of necessity, interfere with the liberties of facilities’ owners to use their property as they saw fit.

Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896.

Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America. —

The projected benevolence of the Plessy ruling and the Atlanta Compromise seemed to bring a finality to the disorder of the “Negro problem.” Indeed, the finality of the “Negro problem” as the nineteenth century closed meant a United States dead set on playing down the southern horrors of discrimination and playing up what was wrong with Black people.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson ushered in Jim Crow policies designed to disenfranchise Black Americans.