SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

A sturdy examination of the famed Supreme Court case that made America safe for apartheid for more than half a century.

In 1892, writes Fireside (Emeritus/Ithaca College; Brown v. Board of Education, 1994), an octoroon—that is, one-eighth black—Louisianan named Homer Plessy refused to relinquish his seat in a whites-only railroad car. It was a premeditated protest; “Plessy repeated what he had prepared to say: that he had properly bought a first-class ticket and was therefore entitled to stay where he was.” The passengers were a tad confused, for Plessy appeared white; yet by Louisiana law, anyone with even a drop of “colored blood” was nonwhite, and so Plessy was charged with crimes “against the peace and dignity of the State.” Freed on bond, Plessy mounted a spirited defense against the charges and challenged Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws. Eventually, the matter went before the US Supreme Court, which in 1896 ruled against Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson, holding “that [the Louisiana law] does not conflict with the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, is too clear for argument.” Fireside considers the Court’s ruling in the context of contemporary judicial theory—“until the New Deal revolution, three decades into the next century,” the Court allowed the individual states considerable leeway in matters of racial segregation by virtue of the Tenth Amendment—and in the context of the larger society, which was stunningly racist. So much so, Fireside observes, that the founder of the Ku Klux Klan resigned from the presidency, “evidently aghast at the widespread murders and lynchings being committed by vigilante thugs in the KKK’s name,” which apparently didn’t bother the locals much, even as the Supreme Court argued that the law was “powerless to eradicate social instincts.”

Solid work on all fronts, particularly for readers without much background in the life and times of Jim Crow.