'Separate and Unequal': A legacy of legally sanctioned racial injustice

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law providing for "separate but equal" accommodations for blacks and whites on the state's railroads. In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy, a black Creole who could easily have passed for white, purposefully boarded a car reserved for whites and informed the conductor, "I have to tell you that, according to Louisiana law, I am a colored man."

Plessy intended to test the constitutionality of the "separate but equal" law with the support of a citizens' group formed to test the law. Promptly arrested, Plessy was tried and found guilty of violating a state law. On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Louisiana law was constitutional, making it a model for the subsequent welter of segregation laws in the South, as well as segregation by convention in a remarkable number of Northern states.

The Plessy case has had a most pernicious and destructive effect on American life, and the reasons for this antedated Plessy, according to Harvey Fireside, professor emeritus of Ithaca College. In "Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision that Legalized Racism," Fireside examines earlier 19th-century court decisions, ideologies, and politics that led to and followed that momentous 1896 decision. The result is a highly readable book, a marvel of concision and prudent topical choice.

Fireside begins with Roberts v. the City of Boston (1849), when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled to allow school segregation in Boston. But despite the Massachusetts legislature invalidation of that ruling in 1855, it was used as precedent against Homer Plessy.

He discusses the legacy of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that African Americans " have no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Therefore, they could never become citizens. Why? Because, said Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, African Americans are "beings of an inferior order ... altogether unfit to associate with the white race ... " Fireside also details a number of cases with negative and depressing outcomes between 1873 and 1896, all successfully frustrating the intent of the framers of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

In 1873, in the Slaughter House cases, in which butchers challenged a monopoly by a state corporation in Louisiana for slaughtering animals, the Supreme Court determined that there were two American citizenships: one federal and one state. This seemingly innocuous ruling left African Americans at the mercy of baleful Southern states. Three years later, a white mob killed approximately 100 black men attending a political meeting. Nine were arrested, tried and found not guilty of murder but guilty of conspiracy. The Supreme Court reversed these convictions, setting them free.

Plessy and his support group hired the brilliant lawyer, Albion Tourgée. But even Tourgée's brilliance was insufficient to overcome the new ideology of Social Darwinism that had swept through the nation. In the Plessy case, Fireside argues, Chief Justice Henry Brown, a New Englander, "reflected his Social Darwinist credo in which Anglo Saxons were seen as natural pillars of a lawful society." Ironically, the lone dissenter was Justice John M. Harlan, a Southerner. He wrote "there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens," and continued, with prophetic accuracy, that "the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case."

Soon after, all the Southern states legally disenfranchised nearly all their African-American citizens. Lynchings continued unabated. By the turn of the century, the former Confederate states had become two societies — both impoverished by segregation.

Fireside judiciously chooses the most telling court cases, legislation and shifting political moods that directly influenced the Plessy decision. He ends with a discussion of the recent Supreme Court cases of Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), and Gratz and Hamacher v. Bollinger (2003), where the court allowed race to be considered in the admissions of law students and disallowed what the court interpreted as "minimum quotas" in undergraduate admissions.

Fireside asks: "Has fifty years of fitful integration [after the 1954 Brown decision] really satisfied the demand for justice? Or does history require yet another measure of restitution of the scales of justice to finally be balanced?" He believes the answer is a policy that would "assure African American children access to the best education ... benefiting not only them and their families but all of us who stand to share in the enjoyment of their skills and talents."

It requires that and more, for "Separate and Unequal" reveals the yoke of the Plessy decision that burdens us. Fireside's book informatively targets the idiocy of the doctrine of racial superiority while delivering an impassioned plea for Americans to live up to the ideals we sell to others abroad.

John C. Walter is professor of history in the American Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Washington.