ipl-logo

Plessy Vs Ferguson Case Study

1002 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The controversy of plessy vs ferguson

Chaseng Xiong
Blount
4th Period
3/14/18
Plessy Vs. Ferguson The case of Plessy Vs. Ferguson took place in the Old Louisiana State Capitol. The petitioner of the case was Homer Plessy, and the respondent of the case was John H. Ferguson. The hearing began on April 13th, 1896, and came to a conclusion on May 18th, 1896. This case was one of the beginning cases for Separate but Equal, and is still remembered to this day.
This case all started when Plessy, who was seven eighths white, sat down in the “white” train car and was asked to leave and sit in the “colored” train car. After his refusal to leave, he was arrested and convicted for not abiding by the Separate Car Act. The Separate Car Act was one of the first acts that had separated any races from another. This sparked many controversies that had occurred in the United States …show more content…

Harlan did not understand why white people decided to treat colored people as beneath them. The treatment of colored people, in this aspect, clearly had conflicts with the thirteenth amendment, yet the majority was ignoring what the thirteenth amendment had stated. What Harlan said was that the thirteenth amendment was not only to banish the existence of enslavement for everybody, but to give everybody no matter what color the freedom to move about equally. Due to being confined on where they can go and what they can do, affects the thirteenth amendment. Also due to being treated as such, due to the color of their skin, affects the fourteenth amendment by not abiding to their treatment of equality. Harlan ended his statement with comparing it to the ending of the Dred Scott case. He compared it by saying that it would end up terribly for the United States as a whole and cause many conflicts of political unrest for the inequality of

Show More
Related
265 Words | 2 Pages

The Abbott case however didn't apply to intrastate commerce, travel that is entirely inside the borders of Louisiana, so Martimet and Tourgée began to look for yet another lighter skinned black to test the law. In the end they found Homer Plessy, a member of the citizens' committee that raised the money for the original case. Plessy walked into Press Street Depot on June 7, 1892 and bought a first class ticket to Covington, he boarded the East Louisiana Railroad train. As the train preceded to pull away a conductor approached Plessy and asked if he was a colored man. Plessy told the man he was and was asked to move to the colored car, but Plessy refused to do so.

Read More
548 Words | 3 Pages

Plessy v Fergusen was yet another court case where “separate but equal” was not implementing equality. It showed that they still thought of Black men and women as being less and not deserving the same rights as the White men. Homer Plessy was a free man, that was mainly White and because of a percentage he had of being Black he was treated as a Black man. He tried to sit in the train car of the White men and much like Rosa Parks was asked to go to the back where the Black men belonged in a different car. This case resulted in the Supreme Court defending the decision of the East Louisiana Railroad stating that they weren't violating any law by the ruling they had.

Read More
355 Words | 2 Pages

Homer Plessy was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black and agreed to test the constitution parts of the Separate Car Law. In 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested because he bought a ticket for a trip and sat down in an empty seat in a white-only train car. Hon. John H. Ferguson of the U.S. District Court dismissed Homer’s claims that his arrest was unconstitutional.

Read More
288 Words | 2 Pages

This document is from the dissent of Mr. Justice Harlan in the Plessy v. Ferguson trial decided on May 18, 1896. His audience is the assenting Justices, and any citizen of the United States that reads the decision handed down by the court. Justice Harlan wrote his Dissent to the case to establish that the assenting judges were amiss in their decision to uphold the Louisiana Separate Car Act. Justice Harlan believes that the decision of the court is wrong on the basis that, if read as purported the U.S. Constitution has no caste, and is therefore color blind. He says “the white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.

Read More
416 Words | 2 Pages

To understand the question, focusing on the court cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, we must first understand each court case on its own. Plessy v. Ferguson resulted in the year 1896. The case involved the 1890s Louisiana law that basically stated that there were separate railway carriages that were specifically labeled for blacks only and whites only. Plessy v. Ferguson involved Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black and appeared to look like a white man. Plessy took an open seat in a white only railway car.

Read More
1590 Words | 7 Pages

The main people of this supreme court was Plessy a black man that sat in the white part of the train or a Jim Crow car. Plessy was the one suing because Plessy thought that the 14th Amendment was being violated and as well the equal protection clause. Plessy was suing John H. Ferguson another main person in the case as well and John H. Ferguson upheld the state law or the Louisiana law. The case took place in the supreme court in 1896. The event related to the case happened in Louisiana Jim Crow car or a train and Plessy sat on the white part of the train but Plessy was black.

Read More
466 Words | 2 Pages

Plessy vs. Ferguson a case that tested the “separate but equal” philosophy, had a negative impact on America. Plessy vs. Ferguson was a famous case that took action in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1896 just after President Abraham Lincoln issued the “Emancipation Proclamation” in 1863 (“Emancipation Proclamation Article”) to free all slaves. Homer Plessy and John Ferguson were the main key players in the case. African American passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law and was fined for sitting in the wrong seat/section of the train.

Read More
688 Words | 3 Pages

Plessy vs. Ferguson, one of the bigger cases in the turning point for rights, gave the black community a big boost forward. There was a man named Homer Adoph Plessy that had a problem with the way things were going at the time and he wanted equal rights. But there was another man named John Ferguson who thought that everything was just skippy. They went to court to settle their quarrel.

Read More
1286 Words | 6 Pages

Ferguson case was passed in 1896. “This decision approved segregation of the races as being consistent with the 14th amendment and formulated the doctrine of "separate but equal" facilities. It served as a legal basis for segregation in education. The case arose when one Homer A. Plessy, who was 7/8ths caucasian and 1/8th negro, was arrested for entering a railroad coach reserved for whites and refusing to sit in a segregated couch for negroes. The court, speaking through Justice Henry B Brown, found that these "separate but equal accommodations" satisfied the demands of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Read More
697 Words | 3 Pages

Ferguson. Plessy v. Ferguson is known as the case that put Jim Crow laws on the map and with is an era of discrimination and segregation in the United States. The case was brought to the Supreme Court in 1896, Mr.Plessy was a man from Louisiana who went on a train and took an empty seat where white people were normally accommodated , the interesting tidbit was that the rail line had no policy of distinguishing passengers based off of race or ethnicity. However a conductor of the train went up to Mr. Plessy and told him to move with the threat of ejection and or imprisonment. After refusing to move from his seat he was arrested and was taken to court to talk of issues regarding racial mixing

Read More
1551 Words | 7 Pages

For nearly a century, the United States was occupied by the racial segregation of black and white people. The constitutionality of this “separation of humans into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life” had not been decided until a deliberate provocation to the law was made. The goal of this test was to have a mulatto, someone of mixed blood, defy the segregated train car law and raise a dispute on the fairness of being categorized as colored or not. This test went down in history as Plessy v. Ferguson, a planned challenge to the law during a period ruled by Jim Crow laws and the idea of “separate but equal” without equality for African Americans. This challenge forced the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation, and in result of the case, caused the nation to have split opinions of support and

Read More
731 Words | 3 Pages

Plessy then took this case to the Supreme Court, where their ruling set up a distinction between the Blacks and the White, who were supposedly equal (Bagwell, Jason). The Supreme Court ruled that even though the Fourteenth Amendment said that the two races were equal, those rights only went so far, and even went further on to say that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to slavery (McBride,

Read More
1239 Words | 5 Pages

The Civil War had just ended and African Americans were facing discrimination in the country. Both men wanted equality for African Americans but had different

Read More
115 Words | 1 Pages

That is where "separate but equal." came in. Why the court ignored his warning is not clear, but I think it‘s because they turned their cheeks away from this threat thinking that they had everything under control and that this unfairness in segregation wouldn‘t actually become a threat.

Read More
231 Words | 1 Pages

The first main point I will be talking about is when he said that "The Negro is still not free." He said this because in that time, Negroes were not allowed to do many things that white people were allowed to do. White people and Negroes had to drink from different water fountains and go to different bathrooms. Negroes weren't allowed to vote too.

Read More

More about Plessy Vs Ferguson Case Study

Related Topics

Open Document