The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir's Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era by Jack M. Beermann

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir's Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era by Jack M. Beermann Stephen A. West The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir's Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era. By Jack M. Beermann. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. xviii, 238. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3183-4.) This book explores the background, legal arguments, and lasting significance of Hall v. Decuir, a unanimous 1878 decision by the United States Supreme Court holding that Louisiana lacked the power to ban racial segregation on Mississippi River steamboats. Although the case has received far less attention than the Civil Rights Cases (1883), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and others bearing on racial segregation, Jack M. Beermann argues that it marked "a significant milestone in the march toward Jim Crow" (p. 4). Beermann opens by providing background on the litigants and on Reconstruction in Louisiana. Before the Civil War, Josephine Decuir and her husband, Antoine Decuir, were elite members of the state's mixed-ancestry, free gens de couleur and held more than one hundred people in slavery. During Reconstruction, her brother Antoine Dubuclet served as Louisiana state treasurer, and her cousin P. G. Deslonde was secretary of state. Both were part of a biracial Republican coalition that rewrote Louisiana's constitution in 1868 to ban racial discrimination in public accommodations and followed up with an 1869 antidiscrimination statute. But in 1872, when Josephine Decuir traveled from New Orleans to Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, the captain and crew of the riverboat Governor Allen denied her entry to the first-class "ladies' cabin" and tried to consign her to the "bureau"—a derogatory name suggestive of the Freedmen's Bureau for the space accommodating Black passengers, both male and female. Decuir sued Captain John Benson, alleging that his illegal conduct caused her "much mental pain, shame, and mortification" (p. 64). Benson's attorneys replied that racial segregation was common on steamboats and essential to maintaining the patronage of white passengers; moreover, they said, Louisiana lacked the power to regulate carriers on the Mississippi River. The trial court ruled in Decuir's favor, and the state supreme court concurred. The book's final chapters explore Benson's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and situate the outcome in the context of Reconstruction's demise—and the Court's role in hastening it. In January 1878, the Court unanimously ruled against Decuir and for Benson's widow, Eliza Jane Hall, who continued the case after his death. The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, sidestepped arguments about civil rights and ruled instead that Louisiana's ban on racial discrimination infringed on Congress's constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. As Beermann explains, it was one of the Court's first decisions based on the theory of a so-called dormant commerce [End Page 572] clause—that is, the view that Congressional authority is exclusive and bars states from imposing an undue burden on interstate commerce even in the absence of conflicting federal legislation. Although Decuir's journey began and ended in Louisiana, the court held that travel on the Mississippi River was unavoidably of an interstate character. Beermann, a professor of law, puts his legal expertise to good use while also enriching the story with historical sources and context. He draws on historians' work to discuss Reconstruction and the place of free people of color in Louisiana. His biographical vignettes about the litigants and lawyers are interesting, though uneven in their payoff. While it is important, for example, to know that one of Benson's attorneys, R. H. Marr, represented perpetrators of the Colfax massacre in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1875) and was later named to the Louisiana Supreme Court, less obvious is the relevance of several pages on the divorce of E. K. Washington, who represented Decuir. Beermann makes clear how the Court's ruling in Hall v. Decuir was both in line with and apart from other decisions restricting civil rights protections during and after Reconstruction. Where in other cases, the Court limited federal power under the Reconstruction Amendments, this was something different: the striking down...