In the Plessy versus Ferguson case of 1896, the US Supreme Court made a ruling that allowed states to build equal but separate facilities for use by colored races. The court argued that as long as the facilities were equal to the ones used by the white population, it was not a form of discrimination. The court stated that segregation is not the same as discrimination and that segregation was constitutional (W, 2004).
The arguments against the legislation were that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which calls for equality, and the Thirteenth Amendment that effectively called for an end to slavery. The Fourteen Amendment restricts states from denying anyone the full protection of the law (Anderson, 2004). Dissent is the expression of opinion that is different from the general belief or standard. Judge Harlan, in his famous ruling on the Plessy versus Ferguson case, dissented arguing that segregation is unconstitutional and that it only promotes hate and a feeling of inferiority by the colored races. He emphasized the blind to color nature of the constitution. Judge Harlan argued that the segregation law was founded on the assumption that colored races were inferior to the whites. He called for the removal of such laws from the constitution. The ruling was significant in the case of Brown v. Board on education in 1954.
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In Plessy versus Ferguson, the court argues that the main fallacy in the plaintiff’s argument is that constitutionally enforced segregation is racial discrimination. Something the court established as baseless and unfounded. Before World War I, many African Americans challenged white supremacy. For example, Home Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car in 1892 breaking the law in Louisiana in the process. The Plessy versus Ferguson ruling emboldened white supremacists. They perpetuated the Jim Crow laws to get more privileges against people of color in southern states (Tischauser, 2012). Jim Crow was a term used to berate African Americans.
References
Anderson, W. (2004). Plessy v. Ferguson: Legalizing segregation . New York, NY: Rosen Pub. Group.
Tischauser, L. V. (2012). Jim Crow laws. Santa Barbara, Calif: Greenwood.
