Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined Jim Crow
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Then, right on cue, the conductor approaches him, asking of Plessy, Are you a colored man? Yes, Plessy replies calmly. The conductor orders him to the colored car. Plessy refuses to go, and moments later, the train comes to a screeching halt as Plessy is arrested, setting into motion one of the most pivotal cases in American Supreme Court history. Hello all, welcome to another episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman, your host. Thanks for joining us. By the 1890s, the hopes of reconstruction in the American South were hanging by a thread. When the United States Supreme Court took up the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, it was meant to be a chance for the court to pull things back from the brink.
In fact, it had the opposite effect. It became the official enshrinement of Jim Crow laws. Today we tell one of the darkest stories of Supreme Court history. And we do it with Michael Ross, professor of constitutional history at the University of Maryland. He is the author of celebrated books, including The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case and Justice of Shattered Dreams, Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court of the Civil War Era. He's also the associate editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History. Professor Ross, Michael, thanks for joining us. Nice to be here. Let's first talk about the man who is the title of this episode and the title of this case, Plessy versus Ferguson. He's the plaintiff.
Tell me about the man. Who was Homer Plessy?
Homer Plessy is a young man. He's in his 20s. He is a shoemaker who lives in the famous Afro-Creole neighborhood of New Orleans, the Treme. And he is associated with a group called the Committee of Citizens. who have organized to litigate against Louisiana's efforts to mandate separate facilities in public accommodations. He is an Afro-Creole. He comes out of the Francophone tradition of New Orleans. He and his colleagues are descended from free persons of color before the Civil War, who are an elite group of poets and writers and musicians. well-educated bilingual people who had known some limited civil rights before the Civil War, had experienced the heady days of the possibility during Reconstruction, and were now outraged that the state government of Louisiana was attempting to restore a caste system in their state and in the American South.
Exactly. It's very important to consider his past and his family's past in that his mother and father were both, I guess officially, it would be the right word, free persons of color, Creole, prior to the Civil War. Then the Civil War happens and along come the Black Codes. A lot of this has to do with the chronology of these events, which we'll go over several different times in this conversation. And it's awkward, of course, today to talk about in these terms, but Plessy's skin color mattered at the time. He was a very light-skinned person. This would have mattered in the telling of this story, right?
It absolutely matters.
Many of the free persons of color were of mixed race heritage, or mulatto, a term used in the 19th century. They had... Their families had included white French-speaking gentlemen, educated white women at times. And Homer Plessy, although in the documents they're going to say he is seven-eighths white, really it's a more complicated story than that.
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