Introduction: the Sins of Segregation

Abstract

Just over one hundred years ago, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana statute mandating segregated railway accommodations.1 The Louisiana statute, and others like it passed throughout the Southern United States in the 1880’s and early 1890’s, did not create the structure of social, economic, and political segregation of the races. Jim Crow had already been planted deep in the institutions, practices, and laws of Nineteenth Century American life.2 Moreover, the “separate but equal” doctrine had emerged in American transportation law through a series of state and federal cases dating already from the 1860’s.3 The legislation of the late 1880’s secured this social and legal structure and threatened punishment for anyone who challenged it. Thus, in one respect, in upholding the Louisiana statute, Plessy merely made manifest the new form that racism had taken in American life after the demise of slavery. Yet, Plessy marks a significant point in American history because it gave new life to the cancer of racism in the U. S. Constitution and the American public mind, undermining the efforts of the Reconstruction Amendments to cut it out. With the separate but equal doctrine, the system of social, economic and political segregation, subordinating an entire race to the will of another and denying members of that race a full and equal place in the civic life of the nation, was publicly reconciled with the demand for “due process” and “equal protection of the laws” that had been written into American fundamental law.