Plessy v. Ferguson

By TheKongregation

  • Plessy removed from train and jailed

    Plessy removed from train and jailed
    An American citizen of mixed descent, 1/8th African American and 7/8ths Caucasian paid in full for a first class train ride in a state where colored people were required to ride in different cars than white people. This Citizen was forcibly removed from a car by a police man and the conductor and then put in jail.

  • The Supreme Court Takes Plessy's Case

    Plelssy's lawyer argued that the Seperate Car act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Ammendments.

  • The Sole Protestor, Justice John Harlan Makes His Argument

    Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. ... The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view.

  • Supreme Court Decides In Favor of Ferguson

    This case set precedent that facilities that were "seperate" for blacks and whites was constitutional as long as they are "equal". This "seperate but equal" doctrine was applied to most area's of public life.

  • Justice Henry Brown Makes The Seven-Man Majority Statement

    "A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- has no
    tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races. ... The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute 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..."

  • Brown v. The Board Of Education

    Until this date, blacks were "seperate but equal" throughout all society and all over America until Brown brought another such argument to court and thankfully, the judges swung the other way this time.