What was plessy v. ferguson yahoo answers

Acts , No. The first section of the statute enacts "that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this State shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations: Provided , That this section shall not be construed to apply to street railroads.

No person or persons, shall be admitted to occupy seats in coaches other than the ones assigned to them on account of the race they belong to. By the second section, it was enacted "that the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required. The third section provides penalties for the refusal or neglect of the officers, directors, conductors, and employees of railway companies to comply with the act, with a proviso that "nothing in this act shall be construed as applying to nurses attending children of the other race.

The information filed in the criminal District Court charged in substance that Plessy, being a passenger between two stations within the State of Louisiana, was assigned by officers of the company to the coach used for the race to which he belonged, but he insisted upon going into a coach used by the race to which he did not belong.

Neither in the information nor plea was his particular race or color averred. The petition for the writ of prohibition averred that petitioner was seven-eighths Caucasian and one eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every right, privilege and immunity secured to citizens of the United States of the white race; and that, upon such theory, he took possession of a vacant seat in a coach where passengers of the white race were accommodated, and was ordered by the conductor to vacate.

The constitutionality of this act is attacked upon the ground that it conflicts both with the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, abolishing slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits certain restrictive legislation on the part of the States. That it does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, is too clear for argument.

Slavery implies involuntary servitude -- a state of bondage; the ownership of mankind as a chattel, or at least the control of the labor and services of one man for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of his own person, property and services. This amendment was said in the Slaughterhouse Cases , 16 Wall. It was intimated, however, in that case that this amendment was regarded by the statesmen of that day as insufficient to protect the colored race from certain laws which had been enacted in the Southern States, imposing upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens and curtailing their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value; and that the Fourteenth Amendment was devised to meet this exigency.

So, too, in the Civil Rights Cases , U. Justice Bradley, "to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business. A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude.

Indeed, we do not understand that the Thirteenth Amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in error in this connection. By the Fourteenth Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are made citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside, and the States are forbidden from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The proper construction of this amendment was first called to the attention of this court in the Slaughterhouse Cases , 16 Wall. The case did not call for any expression of opinion as to the exact rights it was intended to secure to the colored race, but it was said generally that its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro, to give definitions of citizenship of the United States and of the States, and to protect from the hostile legislation of the States the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, as distinguished from those of citizens of the States.

The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.

The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.

One of the earliest of these cases is that of Roberts v. City of Boston , 5 Cush. Charles Sumner , "is that, by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law.

But when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment, but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the paternal consideration and protection of the law for their maintenance and security.

Similar laws have been enacted by Congress under its general power of legislation over the District of Columbia, Rev. State v. McCann , 21 Ohio St. Brummell , 15 S. Flood , 48 California 36; Bertonneau v. School Directors , 3 Woods ; People v. Gallagher , 93 N. Carter , 48 Indiana ; Dawson v. Lee , 3 Kentucky Laws forbidding the intermarriage of the two races may be said in a technical sense to interfere with the freedom of contract, and yet have been universally recognized as within the police power of the State.

Gibson , 36 Indiana The distinction between laws interfering with the political equality of the negro and those requiring the separation of the two races in schools, theatres and railway carriages has been frequently drawn by this court. Thus, in Strauder v. West Virginia , U. Indeed, the right of a colored man that, in the selection of jurors to pass upon his life, liberty and property, there shall be no exclusion of his race and no discrimination against them because of color has been asserted in a number of cases.

Virginia v. Rives , U. Delaware , U. Kentucky , U. Mississippi , U. So, where the laws of a particular locality or the charter of a particular railway corporation has provided that no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of. Railroad Company v. Brown , 17 Wall. Upon the other hand, where a statute of Louisiana required those engaged in the transportation of passengers among the States to give to all persons traveling within that State, upon vessels employed in that business, equal rights and privileges in all parts of the vessel, without distinction on account of race or color, and subjected to an action for damages the owner of such a vessel, who excluded colored passengers on account of their color from the cabin set aside by him for the use of whites, it was held to be, so far as it applied to interstate commerce, unconstitutional and void.

Hall v. De Cuir , 95 U. The court in this case, however, expressly disclaimed that it had anything whatever to do with the statute as a regulation of internal commerce, or affecting anything else than commerce among the States. In the Civil Rights Case , U.

In delivering the opinion of the court, Mr. Justice Bradley observed that the Fourteenth Amendment "does not invest Congress with power to legislate upon subjects that are within the.

It does not authorize Congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights, but to provide modes of redress against the operation of state laws and the action of state officers, executive or judicial, when these are subversive of the fundamental rights specified in the amendment. Positive rights and privileges are undoubtedly secured by the Fourteenth Amendment, but they are secured by way of prohibition against state laws and state proceedings affecting those rights and privileges, and by power given to Congress to legislate for the purpose of carrying such prohibition into effect, and such legislation must necessarily be predicated upon such supposed state laws or state proceedings, and be directed to the correction of their operation and effect.

Railway v. The case was presented in a different aspect from the one under consideration, inasmuch as it was an indictment against the railway company for failing to provide the separate accommodations, but the question considered was the constitutionality of the law. In that case, the Supreme Court of Mississippi, 66 Mississippi , had held that the statute applied solely to commerce within the State, and that, being the construction of the state statute by its highest court, was accepted as conclusive.

No question arises under this section as to the power of the State to separate in different compartments interstate passengers. All that we can consider is whether the State has the power to require that railroad trains within her limits shall have separate accommodations for the two races; that affecting only commerce within the State is no invasion of the power given to Congress by the commerce clause.

A like course of reasoning applies to the case under consideration, since the Supreme Court of Louisiana in the case of the State ex rel. Abbott v. Hicks, Judge, et al. The case was decided largely upon the authority of Railway Co. State , 66 Mississippi , and affirmed by this court in U. In the present case, no question of interference with interstate commerce can possibly arise, since the East Louisiana Railway appears to have been purely a local line, with both its termini within the State of Louisiana.

Railroad v. Miles , 55 Penn. Benson , 85 Tennessee ; The Sue , 22 Fed. Railroad , 23 Fed. Forbes , 37 Fed. King , 18 N. South Pac. Railway , 38 Fed. Georgia Railroad Co. Com'n ; S. While we think the enforced separation of the races, as applied to the internal commerce of the State, neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, we are not prepared to say that the conductor, in assigning passengers to the coaches according to their race, does not act at his peril, or that the provision of the second section of the act that denies to the passenger compensation.

Indeed, we understand it to be conceded by the State's Attorney that such part of the act as exempts from liability the railway company and its officers is unconstitutional.

The power to assign to a particular coach obviously implies the power to determine to which race the passenger belongs, as well as the power to determine who, under the laws of the particular State, is to be deemed a white and who a colored person.

This question, though indicated in the brief of the plaintiff in error, does not properly arise upon the record in this case, since the only issue made is as to the unconstitutionality of the act so far as it requires the railway to provide separate accommodations and the conductor to assign passengers according to their race. It is claimed by the plaintiff in error that, in any mixed community, the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is property in the same sense that a right of action or of inheritance is property.

Conceding this to be so for the purposes of this case, we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so-called property.

Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.

In this connection, it is also suggested by the learned counsel for the plaintiff in error that the same argument that will justify the state legislature in requiring railways to provide separate accommodations for the two races will also authorize them to require separate cars to be provided for people whose hair is of a certain color, or who are aliens, or who belong to certain nationalities, or to enact laws requiring colored people to walk upon one side of the street and white people upon the other, or requiring white men's houses to be painted white and colored men's black, or their vehicles or business signs to be of different colors, upon the theory that one side.

The reply to all this is that every exercise of the police power must be reasonable, and extend only to such laws as are enacted in good faith for the promotion for the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular class. Thus, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins , U. It was held to be a covert attempt on the part of the municipality to make an arbitrary and unjust discrimination against the Chinese race.

While this was the case of a municipal ordinance, a like principle has been held to apply to acts of a state legislature passed in the exercise of the police power. Husen , 95 U. Hudson , 43 Ohio St. Foster , 12 Pick. Wood v. Baker , 38 Wisconsin 71; Monroe v. Plessy , Performance , Provide. Ferguson was a very important case in American History because it enforced segregation even making it legal, and made segregation a concrete reality for the people of the United States.

It began with a man called Homer Plessy. Website: Ezinearticles. Category : Use American in a sentence. Plessy , People. With Judge John …. Website: Biography. Protesting , Plessy. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

Category : Use period in a sentence. Period , Plessy. Ferguson Wikipedia. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.

Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had.

Website: En. Ferguson case of When that body upheld the earlier rulings on May 18, , the separate-but-equal doctrine became the established law of Louisiana and the foundation for Jim Crow policies throughout the country. Website: Plessyandferguson. Plessy , Policies. Supreme Court rules in Plessy v.

In a major victory for supporters of racial segregation, the U. The high court held that as long as equal accommodations were On May 17, , the law was changed. In the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson Final Ruling. Ferguson is a landmark U. Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation even in public accommodations under the doctrine of "separate but equal.

Jump to navigation Jump to search. John Howard Ferguson June 10, — November 12, was an American lawyer and judge from Louisiana, most famous as the defendant in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. Ferguson was born the third and last child to Baptist parents John H. Ferguson Students Britannica Kids … 9 hours ago Plessy v. Ferguson Social Studies for Kids 4 hours ago Plessy v. The ruling, which became known as "separate but equal," legitimize the Jim Crow laws of the southern states in the early twentieth Website: Softschools.

Ferguson Website: Study. The Supreme Court ruled that the "separate but Website: Quizlet. Plessy v ferguson summary Yahoo Search Results 1 hours ago The United States Constitution gave our nation the basic principles and laws to how our government should be ran. Ferguson printfriendly version 9 hours ago Plessy v. In the Plessy decision, the 14th Amendment was interpreted Website: Teachersinstitute. Ferguson , judge of the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, and setting forth, in substance, the Website: Law.

Plessy v Ferguson legal definition of Plessy v Ferguson 4 hours ago Plessy v. Homer Plessy , the … Website: Conchovalleyhomepage.

With Judge John … Website: Biography. Ferguson Wikipedia 8 hours ago Plessy v. The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had Website: En.

What court case overturned Plessy v Ferguson? What was the final decision in Plessy v. John Marshall Harlan — Further Readings. Homer Plessy. Wikipedia: Homer Plessy. Encarta: Homer Plessy. InfoPlease: Homer Plessy.

We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson By Keith Weldon Medley. Vann Woodward. Alumni Volunteers The Boardroom Alumni. Curriculum Materials. Add Event. Main Menu Home. I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. Which of the following was true of most Puritans who emigrated to seventeenth-century New England?

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