Imagine buying a train ticket knowing full well
it's going to end in your arrest. Right. And
like actually taking the step of hiring the detective
to slap the cuffs on you yourself. Yeah. I mean,
we are constantly fed this narrative of the accidental
hero in history. You know, a lone individual
gets fed up, refuses to move, and miraculously
the world changes. It's a great story, but it's
rarely how things actually happen. Exactly. When
you look at the legal foundation of segregation
in America, the spark that ignited the most infamous
Supreme Court case of the 19th century. wasn't
spontaneous at all. No, not even a little. It
was a calculated, meticulously engineered production.
So welcome to today's Deep Dive. We are opening
up a massive file of historical research centered
around the 1896 United States Supreme Court case
Plessy v. Ferguson. And this is the landmark
ruling that effectively codified the devastating
separate but equal doctrine. It basically provided
the legal architecture for systemic segregation
for, well, over half a century. Right. And our
mission today is to uncover the really shocking,
highly orchestrated, behind -the -scenes story
of this case. Because we're going to examine
how a brilliant fight for civil equality completely
backfired in the highest court of the land. And
for you listening, I mean, it is incredibly easy
to view historical events as inevitable. Like
they were just destined to happen. Oh, for sure.
Hindsight makes everything look like it was a
straight line. Yeah. But this deep dive will
reveal how deliberate actions, strategic legal
choices, and the exploitation of legal loopholes
actually shaped the reality you live in today.
Okay, let's unpack this. Let's do it. Because
the infamous train ride at the absolute center
of this case was a setup. A total sting operation.
Let's look at the mechanics of how this incident
was built from the ground up. So in 1890, the
Louisiana State Legislature passed a law called
the Separate Car Act. Right. And this law legally
mandated separate railroad accommodations for
black and white passengers. The stated reason
was supposedly to, quote, promote the comfort
of passengers. Promote the comfort, yeah. And
the penalty for sitting in the wrong car was
either a $25 fine or up to 20 days in prison.
Wow. And to understand the pushback to this,
you really have to understand the unique cultural
landscape of New Orleans at the time. Because
it wasn't like the rest of the South, right?
Exactly. Unlike the strict racial binary most
of the English speaking South, New Orleans had
a long French and Spanish colonial history. So
they had maintained a three tiered racial hierarchy.
Right. So you had white residents, black residents,
and then this really significant prosperous middle
class known as free people of color or Creole.
of color. Yeah, and when the Anglo -American
legal system tried to forcefully crush that nuanced
three -tiered society into a strict black and
white binary. Through laws like the separate
car act. Right, the local community fought back.
A group of prominent black creole of color and
white residents formed a civil rights organization
called the Comité des Citoyens or the Committee
of Citizens. And their plan to challenge this
law was just brilliant. It really was. It was
essentially a structural stress test of the legal
system. They wanted to intentionally break the
law to show where the structural flaws were.
So they specifically recruited Homer Plessy to
buy a first -class train ticket on June 7th,
1892. And Plessy was chosen for a very specific
reason, right? He was what they called an octoroon.
Yeah, meaning he was of seven -eighths white
and one -eighth black ancestry. So he was very
fair -skinned. But under Louisiana law, he was
legally classified as black. OK, so this is where
it gets crazy. What's fascinating here is the
sheer level of logistical maneuvering behind
the scenes. I mean, the Committee of Citizens
didn't just hope Plessy would get arrested. They
guaranteed it. Exactly. On their exact terms.
First, they actually colluded with the railroad
company itself. Wait, the East Louisiana Railroad
supported him? Yeah, they actively opposed the
separate car act. But, you know, not necessarily
out of some deep moral conviction about racial
equality. Oh, let me guess. It was about money.
Hit the nail on the head. buying hauling and
maintaining extra segregated rail cars was incredibly
expensive. It's a logistical nightmare and just
bad for business. So the railroad was informed
beforehand of Plessy's racial lineage and the
intent. to challenge the law. So the railroad
company and the civil rights activists are effectively
co -conspirators. Pretty much. They're working
together to highlight the sheer absurdity of
the state forcing train conductors to visually
classify race on a moving train. Because they
needed to demonstrate that the law was not only
unjust, but practically speaking, unenforceable.
Right. And then they went a step further to control
the narrative. The committee actually hired their
own private detective. Wait, I'm stuck here.
They hired the guy who arrested him. Why not
just let the local police handle it? Ah, because
relying on the local police was way too risky.
If a regular beat cop showed up, they might just
charge Plessy with generic vagrancy or, like,
disturbing the peace. Oh, and a disturbing the
peace charge wouldn't allow Plessy's lawyers
to challenge the constitutionality of the separate
car act. Exactly. By hiring their own detective,
a guy with official arrest powers, and coordinating
with the railroad, the committee ensured Plessy
was charged specifically with violating the new
segregation law. That is so smart. They engineered
the exact legal parameters they needed for a
test case. Yes, they did. Okay, so Plessy boards
the whites -only car at Press Street Depot, refuses
to move when prompted by the conductor, and the
hired detective arrests him at the corner of
Press and Royal Streets. The stress test works.
They get the charge. Right. But getting into
the courtroom is one thing. Winning the argument
is another. Plessy's lawyers argued that the
law violated the 13th and 14th amendments. But
the judge presiding over the criminal court,
Judge John Howard Ferguson, ruled against Plessy.
Yeah, Ferguson argued that Louisiana had the
absolute right to regulate railroad companies
operating strictly within its own state borders.
And when Plessy appealed to the Louisiana Supreme
Court, the state justices upheld Ferguson's ruling.
And the way they justified it is really crucial
for understanding how segregation became nationalized.
Yeah. The source points out that the Louisiana
Supreme Court pointed directly to legal precedents
from northern states. Which is wild. They cited
an 1849 case from the Massachusetts Supreme Court
that legally allowed segregated schools. And
a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that mandated
separate rail cars. And the Pennsylvania court
had even explicitly stated that asserting separateness
is not declaring inferiority, but rather following,
quote, the order of divine providence. Yeah,
that fundamentally changes the narrative that
segregation was purely a Southern invention post
-Civil War. It really does. The legal groundwork,
like the actual structural precedent for separate
but equal, was already being laid in the North
before the Civil War even ended. Right. So Plessy
loses at the state level, but taking it up to
the federal level, was always the ultimate goal
anyway. But by the time it reaches the United
States Supreme Court in 1896, the national mood
has drastically shifted. Yeah. The court issues
a 7 to 1 decision against Homer Plessy, just
as Henry Billings Brown writes the majority opinion.
So what does this all mean? Yeah, how on earth
did the highest court look at the 14th Amendment's
equal protection clause? Which literally says,
no state shall deny to any person the equal protection
of the laws. Right. And legally justify state
-mandated segregation. It requires looking at
a very specific 19th century legal philosophy.
The Supreme Court relied on a broad interpretation
of what is called police power. Police power.
Yeah. In constitutional law, police power is
a state's inherent authority to pass laws regulating
the health, safety, and morals of its citizens.
OK. The Supreme Court gave immense deference
to the Louisiana state legislature. They essentially
said, if Louisiana believes that mixing races
on a train will cause public friction, it is
entirely reasonable for them to separate the
races to maintain public peace. See, I need to
push back on that logic. The 14th Amendment is
a federal foundational constitutional amendment
passed after a brutal civil war specifically
to guarantee equal protection. I just don't understand
how a state's right to regulate something as
subjective as passenger comfort or public peace
can legally override a federal constitutional
amendment. How did they bridge that gap? They
bridge that gap by fracturing the very definition
of equality. How so? The 1896 Supreme Court argued
that the 14th Amendment was only intended to
enforce political and legal equality. Oh, meaning
the right to vote, the right to sit on a jury,
the right to sue someone in court. Exactly. They
stated the amendment, quote, could not have been
intended to abolish distinctions based upon color
or to enforce social as distinguished from political
equality. Wow. So in their legal framework, forcing
people of different races to sit next to each
other in a rail car was a matter of social equality.
Right. They viewed it as an unnatural forced
integration and decided that the Constitution
had no business dictating social arrangements.
But Plessy's lead attorney, Albion Tourge, vehemently
argued against that. I mean, Tourge's main argument
to the Supreme Court was that segregation isn't
just about where you sit. No, it inherently implies
the black people are inferior, permanently branding
them with a second class status. So how did the
court respond to that? The court's response to
Torje's argument is honestly one of the most
astonishing pieces of legal reasoning in American
history. Lay it on me. Justice Brown, writing
for the majority, explicitly stated that if the
enforced separation of the two races stamps the
colored race with a badge of inferiority, it
is, and this is a direct quote from the ruling,
solely because the colored race chooses to put
that construction on it. Are you kidding me?
So the court is essentially arguing a massive
legal paradox. Like the law itself isn't inherently
oppressive. You are just choosing to feel oppressed
by it. That's literally their argument. That
is an incredible deflection of state responsibility.
It completely ignores the reality of the power
dynamics at play. The state passes a law specifically
targeting a group and then blames that group
for interpreting the law as discriminatory. It
is a profound, willful ignorance of reality.
And that willful ignorance brings us to the lone
dissenting voice on the court, Justice John Marshall
Harlan. Right. He earned the historical nickname
The Great Dissenter for his fiery opinion in
this case. Harlan rejected the majority's logic
entirely, and he did it by pointing out a very
telling loophole written directly into the Louisiana
law. Right. What loophole? The Separate Car Act
included a specific exemption for, quote, nurses
attending children of the other race. Oh, meaning
black women were legally permitted to sit in
the white only train car, but only if they were
acting as nannies for white children. Exactly
the point Harlan seized upon. He argued that
this single exception proved the law had absolutely
nothing to do with keeping the races apart for
mutual comfort or public peace. Right. Because
if mixing the races was truly a threat to public
safety, a nanny would be just as disruptive as
any other passenger. Yes. Harlan wrote that everyone
knew the real purpose of the law was to exclude
colored people from coaches occupied by white
persons. Ensuring that black people only entered
white spaces as social subordinates or domestics.
Exactly. And Harlan is deeply famous for a specific
phrase he used in that dissent. He wrote that
the Constitution is, quote, color blind. Right.
And that in the eye of the law, there is in this
country no superior dominant ruling class of
citizens. He boldly predicted that the Plessy
decision would become just as infamous as the
Dred Scott case. And he was completely right
about that. Yeah. His defense of equality is
celebrated in law schools across the country.
But here's where it gets really interesting.
Because history desperately wants to paint these
figures in simple black and white as flawless
heroes or absolute villains. But the source material
reveals a jarring contradiction right in the
middle of Harlan's famous descent. Right. If
we connect this to the bigger picture of racial
attitudes in the 19th century, we see that even
the most progressive legal minds had profound
systemic blind spots. Modern legal scholars have
extensively highlighted a particularly troubling
passage in Harlan's Plessy dissent. What does
it say? Well, in the very same document where
he beautifully argues that the Constitution is
colorblind regarding black Americans, Harlan
includes a deeply racist diatribe against the
Chinese race. Wow. He writes that the Chinese
race is, quote, so different from our own that
we do not permit those belonging to it to become
citizens. and then he uses them as a rhetorical
prop. Right. He complains about the supposed
irony that a, quote, Chinaman could ride in the
same passenger coach with white citizens while
a black union veteran was forced into a separate
car. This raises an important question about
how we interact with historical texts. You know,
you have to critically examine these celebrated
documents in their entirety. Absolutely. Harlan
was advocating for the legal inclusion of black
Americans by directly contrasting them with another
minority group he deemed entirely alien and unworthy
of citizenship. It is a stark demonstration of
how deeply entrenched white supremacy was at
the time. It permeated even the very legal arguments
that were actively trying to dismantle segregation.
It really vastly complicates the hero narrative.
So Harlan's prediction about the decision's infamy
comes true. But the structural stress test fails
in the courts. The highest court in the land
has spoken. So how does this ripple out into
the real world? Well, the immediate aftermath
for Homer Plessy was incredibly quiet. In 1897,
a year after the Supreme Court ruling, he went
back to Judge Ferguson's criminal court in New
Orleans, changed his plea to guilty, and paid
his $25 fine. And the Committee of Citizens?
Having lost their massive high -stakes Supreme
Court gamble, they disbanded shortly after. But
for the rest of the country, the floodgates had
just been thrown wide open. Because the Plessy
ruling effectively granted state legislators
absolute immunity to implement Jim Crow laws
without fear of federal intervention. The federal
government essentially handed the South a blank
check. Big time. From 1890 to 1908, southern
states convened conventions to entirely rewrite
their state constitutions. They used the legal
cover provided by the Supreme Court to systematically
disenfranchise black voters. Right. And notably,
these sweeping laws disenfranchised tens of thousands
of poor white voters as well. Wait, how did they
do that without violating the 15th Amendment?
Well, since the 15th Amendment prohibited denying
the vote based on race, the states instituted
complex, seemingly race -neutral voter registration
rules. Oh, like... poll taxes and literacy tests.
Exactly. They utilized poll taxes, property tests,
and these labyrinthine literacy tests that were
administered entirely at the discretion of white
polling staff. The result was that African -American
community leaders who had made incredible, hard
-won political gains during the Reconstruction
era were completely excised from the political
system. Yeah, but the source material makes it
clear this wasn't just isolated to the American
South. Right. The Jim Crow practices spread rapidly
northward and westward, especially accelerating
during the Great Migration. The entire country
saw the rise of segregated educational facilities,
housing covenants, hotels, beaches, and harsh
restrictions on interracial marriage. And the
Supreme Court kept consistently backing it up.
They sure did. In a 1927 case called Lum V. Rice,
the Supreme Court upheld the right of a Mississippi
public school district to exclude a Chinese American
girl from a white school, explicitly using the
Plessy Doctrine as their justification. The ruling
infected everything. Right. But we have to talk
about the equal part of separate but equal because
legally the facilities were supposed to be the
same. Yeah. How did the courts justify the obvious
glaring disparities in everyday life. Because
the pretense of equal was nothing more than a
legal fiction. Right. In reality, facilities
for non -whites were intentionally underfunded,
completely substandard, or they simply did not
exist at all. States provided crumbling buildings,
outdated textbooks, and practically zero supplies
for black schools. But mechanically, how did
they get away with it? Because no state actually
wrote the phrase separate but equal into their
statutes. They just wrote the separate part.
Wow. Therefore, there was no obvious state law
to point to if you wanted to sue for equal funding.
So if you wanted to challenge the lack of funding,
you couldn't just go to a local judge. You'd
have to mount another massive federal case all
the way back up to the U .S. Supreme Court. Which
had already declared they wouldn't interfere
with the state's police powers. Precisely. States
faced absolutely zero federal consequences for
this systemic inequality. The federal government
turned a blind eye. It wasn't until the monumental
efforts of the civil rights movement and the
Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that
the Supreme Court finally ruled that segregation
in public education is inherently unequal. Yeah,
that 1954 ruling finally began dismantling Plessy
as a legally binding precedent. So the legal
precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson is dead. But
the historical wounds, the generational trauma
from decades of state -sanctioned, institutionalized
oppression, those don't just vanish when a new
ruling is handed down. No, they definitely don't.
How do communities process a historical anchor
that heavy? It requires an active process of
reckoning and reconciliation. And a truly profound
example of that happened recently in New Orleans.
Oh, really? Yeah. In 2009, descendants from both
sides of that 1896 courtroom came together. Keith
Plessy? a descendant of Homer Plessy's cousin,
and Phoebe Ferguson, the great -great -granddaughter
of Judge John Howard Ferguson. Wait, they teamed
up? Yeah, they established the Plessy and Ferguson
Foundation for Education and Reconciliation.
The descendants of the oppressed and the descendants
of the legal oppressor turning a deeply painful
adversarial history into a joint foundation for
civil rights education. That is a massive course
correction. It's incredible. They've dedicated
their work to creating a modern understanding
of the case's effect on the American conscience.
Wow. That same year, they formed the foundation.
A historical marker was finally placed at the
corner of press and royal streets where Plessy
was first arrested. That's amazing. And then
in early 2022, Louisiana Governor John Bell Edwards
officially granted Homer Plessy a posthumous
pardon. A pardon for a crime that should never
have existed in the first place. Understanding
the raw mechanics of Plessy v Ferguson is so
critical for you today. It proves that monumental
shifts in society, both the terrible regressions
and the progressive leaps, often start with highly
localized, strategically engineered actions.
The Committee of Citizens didn't wait for a spark.
They built the engine themselves. Right. And
studying the Supreme Court's horrific logic from
1896 arms you with the critical thinking needed
to question reasonable legal arguments today.
For sure. When a modern court defers heavily
to a state's right to regulate health, safety,
and morals or claims the law is perfectly neutral
and the oppression is just in the minds of the
marginalized, you now have the historical context
to recognize exactly where that legal architecture
comes from. It gives you a road map. Exactly.
We're about to wrap up. But before we go, I want
to leave you with one final detail to chew on,
a detail from our source material that completely
upends how we attribute historical greatness.
Oh, this is a good one. We spend a lot of time
today dissecting Justice John Marshall Harlan's
famous great dissent, where he beautifully argued
that the Constitution is colorblind. For over
a century, law students have been taught to revere
Harlan for penning one of the most famous defenses
of civil rights in judicial history. But according
to the research of New Orleans historian Keith
Weldon Medley, those famous words did not originate
with Justice Harlan. No, they didn't. Medley
found that the colorblind argument was actually
taken directly from the legal briefs filed by
the Committee of Citizens. That is just wild.
The 19th century's most famous judicial defense
of civil rights wasn't authored by an enlightened
Supreme Court justice sitting on a bench in Washington.
It was written by the very citizens in New Orleans
who were being actively oppressed. Yeah. The
structural stress tests they engineered didn't
have the ending they wanted, but they successfully
smuggled their voice, their exact words, into
the permanent historical record of the United
States. Consider who actually authors our history.
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.