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Plessy V. Ferguson Case Study

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Plessy v. Ferguson This case dates back in to 1982 when Homer Please was arrested for sitting in a “white” car of a train (Wormser, n.d.). Obviously this goes back where discrimination against black was going on. Plessy was said to pass as white due to his light skin; however, due to Louisiana law he was required to sit in the “colored” car. He was a “Creole of Color” which is used to refer to a black person in New Orleans whose ancestor were traced to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean (Wormser, n.d.). After his arrest, black civil right organization challenged the law (Wormser, n.d.). Plessy intentionally sat in the white section, and got arrested. The case ended going to the Supreme Court in 1986. Attorney for Plessy argued that the Separate Car Act violated his 13th and 14th Amendments (Wormser, n.d.). …show more content…

Speaking for the majority was Justice Henry Brown. He stated that “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.” (Wormser, n.d.). In addition, that the 14th amendment was to undoubtedly enforce the equality of the two races before the law, and that it could have not been intended to abolish distinctions base on color (Wormser, n.d.). This case law allowed for segregation as long as that everyone were treated

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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

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Homer Plessy was a brave man willing to stand up against southern Jim Crow laws, and that is fate in the Supreme Court is unfair. The Separate Car Act dictates that separate races must sit in separate cars, which is segregatory, and passed by the state of Louisiana. This is in direct violation of the 14th, and rightfully deserved to be challenged. African Americans everywhere should be able to use their rights earned by four long years of bloodshed, and not be dampened by the courts. But the court overlooked the fact that it was an state law, and not private policy, and deemed the segregation private and thus legal.

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The Plessy v. Ferguson case is another example of segregation. In 1892, a black shoemaker named Homer Plessy was jailed for riding in a “white” car in Louisiana. Plessy was considered a Creole of Color because his ancestors traced back to French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana. The case arose from resentment among black and Creole residents of Louisiana. He went up against the state of Louisiana saying that the Separate Car Act violated the 13th and 14th amendments.

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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.

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Plessy V. Ferguson. In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, which required whites and blacks to ride in separate train cars. In 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a “whites only” car. Plessy filed a lawsuit declaring that his constitutional rights had been violated. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate accommodations were constitutional as long as they were equal.

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Both cases were taken to the United States Supreme Court and was decided by the nine justices. Having this segregation caused fights, disagreements, and more cases brought into court because if race, but it was the start of a new world. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson started around the 1890s when the Separate Car Act statute was passed in Louisiana. This act stated that any companies carrying people in Louisiana must have separate but equal areas for the whites and blacks. Homer Plessy, in 1992, was one-eight black and purchased a ticket for first class and, sat in the white only area.

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The Brown v. Board of Education was a monumental decision as it expressed that “separate but unequal” from Plessy v. Ferguson was inherently unequal, meaning it was unconstitutional. The decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson as it stated that racial segregation of public education violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Oliver Brown was a parent of a child that was rejected from Topeka’s white schools and Brown took this injustice to court. With the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, a unanimous decision was ruled to desegregate the public education system. The ruling led to mixed reactions in the nation, as the South was appalled by the decision and attempted to stop the decision from being carried out.

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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.

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The case involving Homer Plessy, who was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court in New Orleans originated in 1892 as a challenge to Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890. The law required that all railroads operating in the state of Louisiana provide equal but separate accommodations for white and African American passengers and prohibited passengers from entering accommodations other than those to which they had been assigned on the basis of their race. It banned whites from sitting in the black cars and blacks in white cars and penalized employees for violating its terms, with the exception of nurses caring children of the other race. However there was an exception to this law that the law could not be applied to interstate

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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.”

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Ferguson was a court case that arose in Louisiana, and it created a drastically different atmosphere in 1896. This court case gave state laws that required black and white people to use separate facilities. The case came into light when Homer Plessy, an African-American, never moved to the “colored only” section on a train. Plessy was said to have had his Fourteenth Amendment violated because the separated facilities were discriminating; however the Court stated that the separate facilities were separate yet equal. Separate yet equal means that people have the same rights, but are separated by their race, religion, and wealth.

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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

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The Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case challenged segregation laws. The Plessy v. Ferguson case started when Homer Plessy was arrested for disregarding a segregation law. Plessy was arrested because he “refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law” (Plessy v. Ferguson). This explains that Plessy was arrested for not following the segregation law that he knew about but denied to comply to.

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The case occurred when Homer Plessy refused to sit in the Jim Crow car, which violated the Louisiana law and was put before Judge John H. Ferguson to challenge whether the state law conflicted with the Constitution or not. Indeed, in 1896, Ferguson concluded that the law was merely a legal distinction between two races and did not conflict with 13th amendment law. Society then adopted a system of “separate but equal” that emphasized separate facilities for blacks and whites

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In 1892, Homer Plessy was riding on a train in Louisiana. He sat down in the car reserved for white passengers and refused to move when asked by the conductor. He was arrested and went to court, where he was convicted based on the 1890 Louisiana law stating that railway segregation was legal as long as both cars were equal. He appealed to the state supreme court, who affirmed the decision of the trial court, and it was brought to the Supreme Court. They ruled in an overwhelming 7-1 decision that as long as the cars were equal, segregation was legal.

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