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Plessy vs. Ferguson  One drop of "colored" blood made you "colored." Plessy went to court and argued, in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. He was found guilty of refusing to leave the "white" car. Homer Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which upheld Ferguson's decision. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard Plessy's case and found him guilty once again. The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, showed incredible foresight when he wrote: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law...In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case...The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution." Over time, the words of Justice Harlan rang true. The Plessy decision set the precedent that "separate" facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were "equal." The "separate but equal" doctrine was quickly extended to cover many areas of public life, such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. Not until 1954, in the equally important Brown v. Board of Education decision, would the "separate but equal" doctrine be struck down.  But who was Jim Crow? It's thought that he was a slave from Cincinnati, Ohio; others say he was from Charleston, South Carolina. Another faction holds that Jim Crow derived from old man Crow, the slaveholder. A final group says that the Crow came from the simile, black as a crow. Whatever the case, by 1838, the term was wedged into the language as a synonym for Negro. Thus, "Jim Crow laws" meant Negro laws. |
Sunday, February 09, 2025
Repost: Black History Month: Separate But Equal
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It’s astounding what a history we have in the United States. Plessy was a great man for standing up to injustice and ignorance.
ReplyDeleteIt's even astounding this went on with mix folks. And here we still are. Before you know it, we'll have separate train cars and backs of buses again.
ReplyDeleteThank you for publishing these Black History stories. They are important for all of us (white, mixed, and black) who lived during the separate but equal years.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the lessons of Plessy, Parkes, and others have been forgotten and the wheel is turning backwards. I do hope, that the courts will upheld your Constitution for all people.
ReplyDeleteSeparate but equal, what a joke that was.
ReplyDeleteMore like separate and unequal, as my own father observed as an army recruit from California sent to Fort Polk Louisiana 1955/56. The family had heard of segregation in the south but couldn’t believe decent people would put up with it. My father saw for himself how black people were mistreated in Louisiana.
Made to walk in the gutter when white people were on the sidewalk, children denied to buy ice cream cones at a drug store, women waiting in line at a dept store being ignored by racist cashiers as they served white people first, my father being chased out of a colored bathroom, he thought the signs white and colored were painting instructions for the doors, by a black man fearful they both would be arrested under segregation laws. For my father the racism and segregation were an eye opener. As one woman told him when she found out he was from California, “we do things differently in the South, we keep people in their place”.
And some of our very own Supreme Court justices of today have spoken of revisiting Brown vs Board of Education in order to reverse it. This cannot be tolerated, as it will open the floodgates to more repeals of established law and the eroding of equality for all with flawed laws and flawed legal arguments. The same flawed logic and sick reasoning that gave us Dread Scott and separate but equal.
-Rj
I'll never understand things like this. So what if people are differently coloured? They're still people! I'm a "white" person with light olive skin that tans easily, as a child I spent entire summers on the beach coming back to the new school year as brown as an aboriginal. Nobody said a word about it.
ReplyDeleteDo not judge a man by the colour of his skin but by the content of his heart... unless of course that man happens to be a hideous shade of orange.
ReplyDeleteHistory must never be forgotten or distorted.
ReplyDelete