After the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, various southern municipalities began to establish separate facilities for whites and Aerican Americans. Eight states between 1887 and 1891 enacted laws requiring railroads to maintain separate facilities for the races. Louisiana’s version of this statute, enacted in 1890, outraged blacks, who organized a committee to test the constitutionality of the separate-car law the following year. In 1892 Homer Plessy, an African American, purchased a first-class ticket and occupied a seat in the “white” car. Arrested and convicted, Plessy appealed his case in the Louisiana courts and ultimately the U. S. Supreme Court. Albion Tourgee, a Radical Republican and a major supporter of equal rights, defended Plessy. Tourgee argued that denying his client the right to sit in a first-class car was a violation of his rights under the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited involuntary servitude, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed “equal protection of the laws.” Although six of the Supreme Court justices were former attorneys for railroads or corporations closely allied with railroads (and separate cars meant more trouble and expense for the roads), the Court ruled seven to one against Plessy and legitimized the “separate but equal” doctrine not only on railroads but in schools as well.
Justice Henry B. Brown delivered the majority opinion. He noted that the Fourteenth Amendment did not abolish distinctions based on color and was not meant to force social equality between the races. Brown added that separation laws did not stamp the badge of inferiority on blacks because whites were also separated, which did not make them inferior. Brown concluded the majority opinion with the observation that social equality between races was “the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals.
. . . Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences” and would only prove counterproductive.
John Marshall Harlan was the dissenting voice. Harlan, a former slave owner and Union officer, leaned on Tourgee’s brief and insisted that the “Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” that the Thirteenth Amendment eliminated the “badge of servitude” as well as slavery itself, that the so-called “equal” accommodations was a “thin disguise” misleading no one, and that laws “which in fact proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens” will certainly create distrust and “arouse race hate.” Harlan concluded that the Louisiana statute was “inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state, and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States.” Southern states would within a few years enact additional Jim Crow (segregation) laws to effectively separate the races in schools, playgrounds, concert halls, railroad and bus terminals, movie theaters, opera houses, streetcars, and virtually every form of public facilities. Those laws prevailed in the South until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s forced Congress in 1964 to pass the Civil Rights Act that eliminated the concept of “separate but equal.”
Further reading: Paul Finkelman, ed., The Age of Ji-m Crow, Segregation from the End of Reconstruction to the Great Depression (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992); Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
—William Seraile
Speaking frequently in 1905 with a local journalist, William L. Riordon, Plunkitt defended political machines against attacks by reformers, whom he dismissed as quickfading morning glories. These interviews, which Riordon probably embellished, originally appeared as “Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics” in the New York Evening Post; they were subsequently published as Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and have achieved the status of a political classic. In them, Plunkitt described in amusing detail how he succeeded in politics and accumulated a fortune. The key to Plunkitt’s success was winning and keeping the loyalty of the voters in his district. To do so he attended every wake, wedding, christening, and picnic and provided needy constituents with groceries, a bucket of coal on cold days, legal support, a place to live, or a job. Plunkitt used his access to patronage to find work for the unemployed in city agencies, within the political organization itself, or in local businesses anxious to stay on his good side. Plunkitt became wealthy not by stealing but by what he called “honest graft.” Plunkitt made money by acting on inside information about proposed public improvements to which he was privy.
See also machine politics; Tweed Ring.
Further reading: William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Boston: Bedford, 1993).
—Philip Papas
World History
