Plessy v. Ferguson

Impact

The effect of Plessy v. Ferguson on the first half of the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Although the Plessy Court was not the first Court to provide a cramped reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, the context in which the reading occurred was important. Before Plessy, the Supreme Court decided that the Reconstruction amendments could not be used to allow Congress to provide many positive rights to African Americans, notwithstanding the enforcement power provided to Congress in Section 5 of the amendment. However, Plessy limited the use of the Reconstruction amendments by the courts to block state legislation that provided unequal rights to African Americans. Given the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, the blocking function was arguably the narrowest and most essential function the Reconstruction amendments could have had. Without the Reconstruction amendments being broadly available to stop attempts to limit participation of African Americans in as much of American life as possible, the proponents of Jim Crow laws had a largely open field. Plessy simply helped extend and legitimize the Jim Crow era, during which Blacks would lose many of the gains made in the South since the end of the Civil War. It allowed for years of poor treatment of Blacks at the hands of state legislatures rather than merely at the hands of private actors.

The separate but equal doctrine was the Plessy Court's lasting legacy. The doctrine was simple and effective. It provided segregationists with a simple tool and a constitutional imprimatur to regulate out of existence many rights thought to be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. That doctrine provided constitutional protection to those who sought to limit the equality of African Americans. Segregationists were not simply allowed to make Black citizens somewhat invisible through segregation; they were also emboldened to push the envelope of disenfranchisement and inequality as far as possible, knowing that the Supreme Court likely would not act to protect the equality of African Americans. Indeed, a number of southern states, including Louisiana, reworked their constitutions in the late nineteenth century to implicitly or explicitly take rights away from African Americans. Although some of these attempts predated Plessy, the results of some of those actions were effectively immunized by Plessy. Plessy simply made a caste system legally enforceable under a Constitution that guaranteed due process and equal protection.

Plessy was not a radical decision that took the country in a shockingly new direction. However, it did confirm a type of legislation that had been of questionable constitutionality in light of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time of its passage, Plessy was not overly controversial to any of the justices save Harlan and possibly Brewer, who took no part in the decision. Indeed, the decision was not a widely cited constitutional case at its time or for a number of ensuing decades. Until the notion of separate but equal was challenged through cases brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others, Plessy was standard constitutional law fare.

Over time, the majority opinion in Plessy fell out of favor, though many held on to the notion that separate but equal was a reasonable goal. The doctrine was the touchstone for segregationists for years. Segregationists, however, tended to adhere to the separate part of the doctrine but not the equal part. The claims of separate but equal facilities rang hollow when various groups documented the separate and unequal conditions that tended to exist in the South. The arguments eventually became too strong for the doctrine to resist. The doctrine was discarded in a string of Supreme Court cases throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, including Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The eventual discarding of the majority opinion means that Harlan's dissent is far more well known and arguably more important than the majority opinion is today. The dissent not only predicted the racial discord that would follow Plessy; it also gave us the notion of a color-blind Constitution. The phrase color-blind Constitution was a slogan used to argue for an end to segregation and other racist laws. However, it has been used recently by some to argue that affirmative action and other race-conscious laws and remedies are inconsistent with constitutional doctrine. That battle continues to rage and is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.