![]() which involved, however, not a question of race but one of exclusive privileges. The proper construction of this amendment was first called to the attention of this court in the Slaughter-House Cases. ![]() 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. Indeed, we do not understand that the Thirteenth Amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in error in this connection.Ģ. 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. 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. 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.ġ. That the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to which such passenger belongs any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong shall be liable to a fine of $25, or in lieu of thereof, to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison and should any passenger refuse to occupy the coach or compartment to which he or she is assigned by the officer of such railway, said officer shall have power to refuse to carry such passenger on his train, and for such refusal neither he nor the railway company which he represents shall be liable for damages in any of the courts of this state. ![]() 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. This case turns upon the constitutionality of an act of the General Assembly of the state of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races. The Plessy ruling provided legal justification for segregation in transportation, public accommodations, and schools until the Supreme Court effectively overruled it in the 1954 Brown v. All of the justices but one (John Marshall Harlan) agreed with Brown’s arguments. Brown argued that as long as racially separate facilities were equal they did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection of the law. The Plessy decision, excerpted below, was written by Justice Henry Billings Brown. Ferguson (named for the New Orleans Criminal District Court Judge who first ruled against Plessy). In 1892, they arranged for Homer Adolph Plessy (who was one-eighth black and could have readily “passed” for white) to be arrested on an East Louisiana Railway train for refusing to move to the car designated for “colored passengers.” The case eventually reached the U.S. When Louisiana passed such a law in 1890, African Americans in New Orleans resisted in several ways, including mounting a legal challenge. In 1887, Florida passed the first law requiring railways to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races,” and Mississippi, Texas, and other states soon followed suit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |