African-American Plessy V. Ferguson Case

Plessy v. Ferguson was a very important topic in 1892. When an African-American man named Homer Plessy, who looked white decided to ride in a “whites-only” railroad car. Plessy told a white man who worked on the train that he was 1/8 African-American and was arrested for not moving to the “blacks-only” car. The reason he went on the “whites-only” car was to protest against Louisiana’s “Separate Car Act,” which meant blacks and whites had to be in different cars on a train so they could be seperate. This debate soon went to court and was argued if what happened on the train was constitutional or unconstitutional. When Plessy went to court, the court decided that what had happened was constitutional. The court claimed that, even though the

The court may claim that they are separate but equal, but they are not. Harlan follows up with stated some of the 14th Amendment, “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This means, you can’t take away anyone’s rights when they were, “born or naturalized in the United States.” That is how Justice Harlan explains and shows his claim of how what happened on the train was unconstitutional.

Two both very different, the court believes that striking down the Louisiana railroad law would force races to mix, and that’s not what the court wants. The court also states that separating the blacks from whites, “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.” Which means, when blacks and white are in public places and seperate, it doesn’t show that either race is less than the other. Harlan responds with, “Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.” This means that when it comes to blacks riding the train, they have to sit in the car assigned to colored-only, not whites-only, and that it’s not the other way around, like, whites being excluded from the blacks, it’s blacks being excluded from whites. That is how both the court and Justice Harlan’s claims are very different from each other. Plessy v. Ferguson was a very important topic in 1892. When an African-American man named Homer Plessy, who looked white decided to ride in the “whites-only” railroad car. When Homer Plessy went to court, Justice Harlan had a very different claim then the rest of the court. That is what caused this whole argument between the court and Justice Harlan on whether