American History Since 1865: Race and Law at the Time of Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) Drexel University

The ruling of1896 by Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson case upheld the constitutionality of racial discrimination under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The 7-1 decision rejected a challenge to a Louisiana law demanding different railway cars for blacks and whites. The ruling provoked strong reactions across the nation as newspapers, intellectuals, and civil rights activists processed the implications of the Court entrenching legal segregation (Chesnutt, c.1911). The reactions revealed deep regional divides, with Northern liberal voices denouncing the ruling while more conservative Southern voices hailed it as a victory. The decision was a significant setback for civil rights and racial equality. Activists vowed to continue challenging segregation despite the court’s ruling. This paper will talk about how the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson exposed the stark regional divides and limits of racial progress in post-Reconstruction America through the varied reactions it provoked.

The majority views gave by Justice Henry Billings Brown, appealed to “the established usages, customs and traditions of the people” in justifying segregation. Brown argued that if racial separation “stamps the coloured race with a badge of inferiority,” it was “solely because the coloured race chooses to put that construction upon it’. This reasoning outraged the lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, who warned that the Constitution was “colour-blind” and the thin “separate but equal” logic would sanction clear discrimination. Northern papers like the New York Times agreed, calling the ruling “unjust” and “unfortunate” in giving “the sanction of the highest court” to segregation. More conservative Southern papers hailed the decision for affirming local custom and states’ rights against federal interference.

African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois forcefully critiqued the dangerous logic and history of the ruling. In his essay “Strivings of the Negro People,” published in 1897, Du Bois asserted that Plessy “marks a step backwards in the constitutional status of the American Negro. (Du Bois, 1996). He tied the case to a long historical struggle for equality stretching back to emancipation, arguing that while abolition was a major victory, African Americans remained “conditioned by their long habit of dependency” and faced the denial of their rights across civil society. The ruling would only increase the friction and deepen the chasm between the races in America by sanctioning segregation.

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Similarly, the writer Charles Chesnutt authored a critique of Plessy titled “The Court and the Negro” around 1911. Chesnutt condemned the Court’s vagueness in outlining what constitutes “equal” treatment under segregation. He predicted that the South would exploit the fuzzy “separate but equal” logic to continue denying rights and opportunities to blacks (Du Bois, 1996). Chesnutt argued that the Court failed to account for how segregation targeted blacks for exclusion, writing: “What the white man means by separation is exclusion; what the Negro means is inclusion.” He positioned Plessy within a long history of unjust Supreme Court decisions curtailing black rights, including Dred Scott and civil rights cases of the 1870s and 1880s. Chesnutt concluded that the Court deliberately “shut its eyes to the inevitable outcome of its decision.”

The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson provoked various reactions and newspaper coverage nationwide. The New York Times published an opinion piece 2021 on the case, emphasizing Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone powerful dissent against the “separate but equal” doctrine. The New York Times, a Northern liberal paper, editorialized against the ruling as an unjust deprivation of equal rights based on “trivial” logic. The Times granted that separation itself “implies no inferiority” but criticized the Court for ignoring how segregation “does very often imply injustice and humiliation.” Harlan warned that the Constitution was “colour-blind” and predicted the ruling would perpetuate racial injustice.

Southern newspapers like the Montgomery Advertiser covered the local implications of the ruling, such as profiling activist Jackson Giles’ later legal challenges to discrimination in Ala