Who is plessy and ferguson

Du Bois met in Erie, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, to form an organization calling for civil and political rights for African Americans. With its comparatively aggressive approach to combating racial discrimination Thurgood Marshall—perhaps best known as the first African American Supreme Court justice—played an instrumental role in promoting racial equality during the civil rights movement.

As a practicing attorney, Marshall argued a record-breaking 32 cases before the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade was a landmark legal decision issued on January 22, , in which the U. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure across the United States. Marbury v. Madison was a landmark U.

Supreme Court decision that established for the first time that federal courts had the power to overturn an act of Congress on the ground that it violated the U. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Ferguson: Background and Context After the Compromise of led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction.

Black Resistance to Segregation As Southern Black people witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the Black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance.

Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Board of Education. Board of Education Ruling. Board of Education Brown v. Loving V. Virginia Loving v. A Look Back at Segregation in the United States Segregation is the practice of requiring separate housing, education and other services for people of color. This case was decided in and was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in In , Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, which segregated carrier cars by race. On June 7, , Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, sat in a "White" car, identifying himself as black in order to challenge the law.

The thirty-year-old Plessy was jailed for not sitting in the "Colored" car. Decision: With seven votes for Ferguson and one vote against, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory racial segregation was not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite never using the term "separate, but equal," the court's ruling established that principle as a means of justifying segregation.

Furthermore, according to Justice Brown, "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 unsatisfactory to either. Justice John Harlan was the only dissenter. In his opinion, he wrote:. Justice David Brewer did not participate in the decision.

Before the state court, Plessy argued that the separate cars violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. He also argued that the cars for whites were nicer and cleaner than the cars for blacks. Decision: Judge Howard Ferguson ruled that the Louisiana law was constitutional because the state had the right to regulate railroad companies that only ran in the state.

The country's reaction to the ruling was quiet. Just thirteen years earlier Civil Rights cases were in the news, but Plessy was lightly reported and commented on outside of the black newspapers. According to author Harvey Fireside, The New York Times only ran a brief article on the case, saying that it was confined to railroad travel in Louisiana and not Congress's power to regulate commerce.

The article also went on to name other cases cited in the decision. Justice Harlan's prediction proved to be correct. Segregation continued throughout the United States. Read more about it! The information in this guide focuses on primary source materials found in the digitized historic newspapers from the digital collection Chronicling America. The timeline below highlights important dates related to this topic and a section of this guide provides some suggested search strategies for further research in the collection.

Search this Guide Search. Plessy v. Supreme Court makes a critical court decision regarding racial segregation in rail cars. This guide provides access to material related to "Plessy v.

Ferguson" in the Chronicling America digital collection of historic newspapers. About Chronicling America Chronicling America is a searchable digital collection of historic newspaper pages from sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.