Quotes About Plessy v. Ferguson

The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.

The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon

culture—in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a very light-skinned, racially mixed man, had made a planned attempt to challenge Louisiana's 1890 law requiring segregated streetcars. His lawyer, Albion Tourgee, a northern white Reconstruction official and popular novelist, had argued the case on the grounds that the government did not have the right to determine the racial identities of its citizens. But the Supreme Court decided

It is often forgotten today that Plessy v. Ferguson was not an isolated Supreme Court decision. In case after case, the Court reaffirmed and upheld the ability of states to enforce apartheid.