Dr Michael Ross

speaker

223 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Michael Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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American History Hit · Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined Jim Crow · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

I'm opposed to voting rights for African Americans.

And then something happens to him during Reconstruction when he sees the ferocity of the opposition and the violence being used in the South against African Americans trying to claim equal rights and his position shifts.

And he starts to say, you know what?

I'm either going to be part of the past or I'm going to be part of the future.

And he will dissent in the civil rights cases and say, well,

What we know is that businesses that don't admit all customers are perpetuating the legacies of slavery.

They're really doing something that perpetuates, as he calls it, the badges of slavery and the legacy of that institution that the 13th Amendment was meant to get rid of.

And licensed businesses are approved by the state.

And if they're doing it, it's state action.

And he says you can hardly, based on the history of America and including what's happened since the Civil War, say that African-Americans have been the special favorites of the law.

And it's a ringing dissent, but it's a dissent.

And as a result of the civil rights cases, you have this principle out there that the federal government can't reach private businesses.

Right.

But what's interesting about the Plessy case is that the law that Louisiana passes, we're going to still have this principle that private businesses can do what they want.

But now they're being told they have to separate their customers and the railroads in particular don't like it.

They're chafing at the fact that the state is telling them what they have to do.

That is true.

By 1883, it's still largely justices appointed by Lincoln and Grant, etc.

But what you're seeing by the 1880s,

is an increasing attempt amongst some Republicans who say, yes, we're committed to African Americans getting a fair shake, but at the same time, we have this system of federalism where we can't tell the states too much what to do, and we're

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