CLEP American Government, Chapter 25

Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) arose from a deliberate challenge to Louisiana's Separate Car Act. Homer Plessy, a mixed-race citizen whom state law classified as Black, entered a railway car reserved for white passengers and was arrested after refusing to leave. The Supreme Court upheld the state-mandated separation. Its majority reasoned that the Fourteenth Amendment permitted separate facilities if the law imposed formally parallel requirements on both races. That reasoning became associated with the phrase "separate but equal." The Court treated the state's symmetry on paper as constitutionally sufficient while refusing to recognize the legal hierarchy, coercion, and stigma that segregation was designed to impose. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, warning that the Constitution should not tolerate a state-created racial caste. The decision did not merely describe private social separation. Louisiana used public law and criminal enforcement to assign passengers by race. Plessy therefore gave constitutional protection to government-mandated segregation and helped legitimate Jim Crow across schools, transportation, public facilities, and other institutions. Facilities were rarely equal in resources, but inequality in funding was not the doctrine's only defect. The deeper injury was government's use of race to separate citizens and mark unequal status.