Week Six: "Separate but Equal” | Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
The latest Our American Values series focuses on the US Supreme Court and the role it has played in the struggle for civil rights. This new series has three parts. First, we look at two cases that established the principle of judicial review of actions by federal (1803) and state (1817) government. Second, we look at a series of Supreme Court cases decided between 1857 and 1944. These cases made it easier for governments to deny individuals their rights and so each made the moral arc of the universe a little longer. Finally, we look at a series of cases decided between 1886 and 1983 that moved America forward toward justice. For this new series, we draw on some very short (thirty seconds to four-minute videos) from C-SPAN Classroom.
Image courtesy of Library of Congress.
Plessy vs. Ferguson is one of the most notorious cases in the Supreme Court’s “anti-canon” — those cases that made it easier to deny individuals their rights. For nearly sixty years, the precedent set in this case made the moral arc of the universe that much longer by legitimating segregation so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided to blacks and whites. Plessy, however, was also an early “test case” brought as part of a larger legal strategy. In this case, a strategy to overturn a recently enacted Louisiana segregation law in which both the railroad that owned the “white” car Homer Plessy rode and also the arresting officer were knowing participants. In video three, one of Homer Plessy’s descendants tells this fascinating part of the story.
Six short (two to five-minute videos) from C-SPAN Classroom appear at the link below. Spoiler alert: Video number six also discusses Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) which is the case that finally and definitively overturned the precedent that the Court had set in Plessy. If you want to wait, skip number six as we will be looking specifically at Brown vs. Board of Education in three weeks.