THE SEGREGATED SOUTH ★^665Committee of black residents of New Orleans came together to challenge the
law. To create a test case, Homer Plessy, a light- skinned African- American,
refused a conductor’s order to move to the “colored only” part of his railroad
car and was arrested.
To argue the case before the Supreme Court, the Citizens Committee hired
Albion W. Tourgée, who as a judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction
had waged a courageous battle against the Ku Klux Klan. “Citizenship is
national and knows no color,” he insisted, and racial segregation violated the
Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. But in a
7-1 decision, the Court upheld the Louisiana law, arguing that segregated facil-
ities did not discriminate so long as they were “separate but equal.” The lone
dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, reprimanded the majority with an oft- quoted
comment: “Our constitution is color- blind.” Segregation, he insisted, sprang
from whites’ conviction that they were the “dominant race” (a phrase used by
the Court’s majority), and it violated the principle of equal liberty. To Harlan,
freedom for the former slaves meant the right to participate fully and equally
in American society.
Segregation and White Domination
As Harlan predicted, states reacted to the Plessy decision by passing laws
mandating racial segregation in every aspect of southern life, from schools
to hospitals, waiting rooms, toilets, and cemeteries. Some states forbade taxi
drivers to carry members of different races at the same time. Despite the
“thin disguise” (Harlan’s phrase) of equality required by the Court’s “separate
How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South?In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws establishing racial segregation
did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, so long as facilities were
“separate but equal.” In fact, this was almost never the case, as illustrated by these photographs
of the elementary schools for black and white children in South Boston, Virginia, in the early twen-
tieth century.