1 янв 1896 г. - Plessy v. Ferguson legalizes "separate but equal" doctrine

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Plessy. V. Ferguson: An 1896 Supreme Court case that ruled that racially segregated railroad cars and other public facilities, if they claimed to be “separate but equal,” were permissible according to the Fourteenth Amendment.
Jim Crow: Laws that required separation of the races, especially blacks and whites, in public facilities. The post–Civil War decades witnessed many such laws, especially in southern states, and several decades of legal challenges to them. The Supreme Court upheld them in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), giving national approval to a system of racial segregation in the South that lasted until the 1960s.


First-class “ladies’ cars” soon became sites of struggle for racial equality. For three decades after the end of the Civil War, state laws and railroad policies on serving customers varied, and even where segregation was the rule, African Americans often succeeded in securing seats. One reformer noted, however, “There are few ordeals more nerve-wracking than the one which confronts a colored woman when she tries to secure a Pullman reservation in the South and even in some parts of the North.” When they claimed first-class seats, black women often faced confrontations with conductors, resulting in numerous lawsuits in the 1870s and 1880s. Riding the Chesapeake & Ohio line in 1884, young African American journalist Ida B. Wells was told to leave. “I refused,” she wrote later, “saying that the [nearest alternative] car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies’ car, I proposed to stay.” Wells resisted, but the conductor and a baggage handler threw her bodily off the train. Returning home to Memphis, Wells sued and won in local courts, but Tennessee’s supreme court reversed the ruling.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court settled such issues decisively — but not justly. The Plessy v. Ferguson case was brought by civil rights advocates on behalf of Homer Plessy, a New Orleans resident who was one-eighth black. Ordered to leave a first-class car and move to the “colored” car of a Louisiana train, Plessy refused and was arrested. The Court ruled that such segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as blacks had access to accommodations that were “separate but equal” to those of whites. “Separate but equal” was a myth: segregated facilities in the South were flagrantly inferior. Since Reconstruction, most southern states had tried to implement Jim Crow segregation laws, named for a stereotyped black character who appeared in minstrel shows. Though such laws clearly discriminated, the Court allowed them to stand.

Jim Crow laws applied to public schools and parks and also to emerging commercial spaces — hotels, restaurants, streetcars, trains, and eventually sports stadiums and movie theaters. Placing a national stamp of approval on segregation, the Plessy decision remained in place until 1954, when the Court’s Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling finally struck it down. Until then, blacks’ exclusion from first-class “public accommodations” was one of the most painful marks of racism. The Plessy decision, like the rock-bottom wages earned by twelve-year-old girls at Macy’s, showed that consumer culture could be modern and innovative and at the same time hierarchical and unfair. Business and consumer culture were shaped by, and themselves shaped, racial and class injustices.

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