四川外国语大学国际商学院英语国家社会与文化 Plessy v Ferguson.pptVIP

* * Plessy v. Ferguson Louisiana Separate Car Act (1890): equal but separate accommodations” $25 20 days in jail PENALTY Homer Plessy 30, shoemaker 7/8white; 1/8black colored car 1892 Judge John Howard Ferguson unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states. Ferguson found Plessy guilty of refusing to leave the white car. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States found Homer Plessy guilty once again. Justice Henry Brown, the speaker for the eight-person majority, wrote: That [the Separate Car Act] does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery...is too clear for argument...A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races …has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races...The object of the [Fourteenth Amendment] was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds. Brown v. Board of Education A black third-grader Linda Brown, 1951, Topeka, Kansas “…the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” Chief Justice Earl Warren, 1954 *