When he boarded a train in New Orleans on June 7, 1890, Homer Adolph Plessy was going nowhere in particular, except into history. Nor was he surprised to be arrested by Detective Christopher C. Cain. He had agreed to be the guinea pig for a challenge to a new Louisiana law requiring railroads to assign blacks to separate carriages. He took his seat in a coach for whites and it was as part of an amicable little drama arranged between black leaders in Louisiana and the railroad that he was identified and asked to leave.
Louisiana blacks were the most prosperous in the South; they had 18 legislators in the state assembly. They were sure the new law violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which in 1868 guaranteed all citizens equal There was but one dissent among the nine judges. The Constitution was color-blind, said John Harlan, a former Kentucky slave owner. He protested that the ruling would establish a superior, dominant ruling class of citizens and stimulate aggressions more or less brutal and irritating: "The destinies of the two races are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law." As for the stipulation of equal treatment, it was a transparent disguise that would not mislead anyone "or atone for the wrong this day done."
The wrong went way beyond Homer Plessy's railroad seat. It lay in the judicial blessing of racism in all aspects of American life. C. Vann Woodward suggests in his study The Strange Career of Jim Crow that when Union troops left the South in 1877, there was for two to three decades an interregnum that gave blacks some hope. They attended separate churches and schools, but they commonly traveled with whites in second-class rail coaches, streetcars and buses; mixed in the waiting rooms; frequented some of the same eating places; drank at the same water fountains; took their families to the same parks. And in many areas they voted and were urged to vote. Of course, it was by no means a golden age. Blacks were coerced during elections, they had to step off the pavement to give way for whites, their schools were ramshackle or nonexistent and they lived in dread of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1892 there were 155 mob lynchings without a single case being punished; until 1913 an average of one black every week was lynched for crimes that were never committed, and their persecutors went free. Yet only in the 1890s did the South overwhelm the blacks with a plethora of segregation laws and with stratagems to take away the vote. Jim Crow laws-so called after Jim Crow, a comic jumping character in a minstrel show-ended all the mixing there had been and cemented apartheid with Jim Crow entrances and exits, Jim Crow workbenches, Jim Crow taxicabs, Jim Crow cemeteries, Jim Crow park benches and drinking fountains and Jim Crow bibles in courtrooms because a white could not be expected to hold a bible touched by a black. Disenfranchisement gathered pace. In 1896 in Louisiana 130,334 blacks voted; in 1904, the total was 1,342.
All this did not happen just from one single ruling of the Supreme Court, nor did the Court create the exploitable fears, jealousies and hatreds that tormented whites. The North let it happen and the educated South let it happen. Plessy v. Ferguson scarcely made a ripple in the Northern press. Northern liberal sentiment was anxious for reconciliation with the South. The black became a sacrifice to that desire and a casualty of the Spanish-American War, when expansionists invoked doctrines of racial superiority to justify annexing the Philippines. If the brown-skinned Filipinos were not fit to govern themselves, said the Southern racists, how could Negroes qualify to vote in America?
In the South, the black was the catalyst for a reconciliation between the competing classes of Democrat: the redneck rabble-rousers and the conservative landowners and businessmen who had previously been a moderating influence on racial passions. Both groups became alarmed at the success of the Populists in appealing to black and white voters. Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, started a hate campaign following the 1894 election in North Carolina of a white-black, Populist-Republican coalition. He ended up initiating a virtual coup d'Žtat against the legitimate Populist city government of Raleigh.
The South emerged from Reconstruction only to become hostage to one-party rule, and as Mr. Justice Harlan had predicted, both races suffered.
protection of the law. They were right about the intention of the amendment, one of the measures taken to protect the slaves freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court, which had helped to precipitate the Civil War in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, had already shown itself to be mulish about civil equality for freedmen. It had castrated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by saying in 1883 that individuals who owned inns, parks, railways or theaters could discriminate if they wished; only states were enjoined against discrimination. This ought to have made Plessy v. Ferguson an open-and-shut case when it reached the Supreme Court in 1896, since it was the state of Louisiana that was infringing rights. But now the justices fastened onto four cunning words in the Louisiana statute and used them to promulgate a new doctrine that legal-ized the humiliation of black Americans for 58 years. The phrase was "equal but separate accommodations." The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court ruled, guaranteed political, not social, equality. Segregation was constitutional if those segregated enjoyed equal facilities.
BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG
by Leon F. Litwack
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
TROUBLE IN MIND
by Leon F. Litwack