Plessy vs. Ferguson :: essays research papers

Plessy went to court and argued that the Separate automobile Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The judge, a Massachusetts lawyer, was joke Howard Ferguson. He had previously declared the Separate auto Act "unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states." However, in regards to the Plessy trial, he express that Louisiana could regulate railroad companies that only operated within its state. Ferguson found Plessy blameful of refusing to leave the white car.Plessy decided to appeal the closing to the Supreme dally of Louisiana, but that court upheld Fergusons opinion. Plessy then decided to take his case to the coupled States Supreme Court. In 1896, The Supreme Court of the United States found homer Plessy guilty once again. Justice Henry Br declare, the speaker for the eight-person majority, wrote "That the Separate Car Act does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery...is too cl ear for argument...A statute which implies only 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 represent so long as white men are secern from the other race by color -- has no tendency to discharge the legal equality of the two races...The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the peremptory 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 unacceptable to either."The whizz lone dissenter, who argued in favor of Plessys case, and seemed to be the only one with a real understanding of equality, was Justice John Harlan. He wrote his own speech regarding the case and its decision."Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes am ong citizens. In respect of gracious rights, all citizens are equal before the law...In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case...The present decision, it may rise be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the flavour that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.