y v. Ferguson, 163 U.S 537, 16 S.Ct. 1138, 41 L.Ed. 256 (1896) came before the Supreme Court. Homer Adolph Plessy, who was seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth Negro, had taken a seat in a white coach on an East Louisiana Railroad train bound for Covington, Louisiana. He told the conductor that he was colored (it was not obvious) and, after refusing to move to a "Jim Crow car," he was arrested and imprisoned under a criminal charge of violating a Louisiana law that stated in part
. . . that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations. . . (Plessy v. Ferguson 540) (emphasis added).
This "equal but separate" doctrine was upheld by the Louisiana court and by the U.S. Supreme Court. In writing the majority opinion, Mr. Justice Brown first argued that the Louisiana law "does not conflict with the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude . . . is too clear for argument" (Plessy v. Ferguson 541). He then goes on to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in a similar vein. Although its object, he says, was to
. . . enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law . . . it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring their separation . . . do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools f...