Supreme Court Cases: The Plessy Vs. Ferguson Case

Precedents Established by Landmark Constitutional Supreme Court Cases

Supreme Court cases are important to human rights and are capable of setting new precedents for people. Many major Supreme Court cases such as Plessy vs Ferguson and Brown vs The Board of Education are interrelated. Plessy vs Ferguson was a case back in 1890, involving the racial, “separate but equal” terminology. The Brown vs The Board of Education case occurred in the 1950s about their Equal Protection Clause being violated.

The Plessy vs Ferguson case occurred in 1890 and involved violations of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendment rights about the “separate but equal” controversy. Homer Plessy was an eighth of African American. In the 1890s, segregation was legal

Plessy, being one eighth African American, was forced to sit with the other African Americans, even though he had payed for a first class seat with the white people. Plessy was then arrested because he did not sit with people of his race. The justices said the case had nothing to do with the thirteenth amendment and it was too transparent to argue about. The fourteenth amendment was not intended the way Plessy was arguing said. Only one person disagreed with the final decision of the case, Mr. Justice Harlan. In the dissenting opinion report, it says, “So that we have before us a state enactment that compels, under penalties, the separation of the two races in railroad passenger coaches, and makes it a crime for a citizen of either race to enter a coach that has been assigned to citizens of the other race...The thirteenth amendment does not permit the withholding or the deprivation of any right necessarily inhering in freedom...declaring that ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,’ and that 'no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…” This means that colored people may not go into whites-only coaches and white

Linda Brown was an African American woman who went through dangerous conditions on her commute to public education. According to the text, "Federal district court decided that segregation in public education was harmful to black children, but because all-black schools and all-white schools had similar buildings, transportation, curricula, and teachers, the segregation was legal." There was a public school that was closer to Brown, but it was all white, no colored people allowed. But since the levels of the school were mostly the same, it was dismissed from the Kansas federal district court. Linda and her family appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The majority opinion stated that "The ‘separate but equal’ doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, has no place in the field of public education." People of different races work together in society. Segregating them won't prepare them for life. No matter how much they try, it is impossible to make both educational systems perfectly equal. "Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal." The racially-segregated schools may not be as ideal as non-segregated schools. For instance, teachers might only want to work at the whites-only schools, not the African American schools. Even though they're