Plessy Vs Ferguson Court Case Analysis

“What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?”- John Marshall Harlan. On May 18, 1896, the Supreme court passed the separate but equal act on a vote of 7-1. This allowed separate facilities to be made for whites and blacks. This was the result of the Plessy vs Ferguson case, where a man was forced out of a whites-only car because he had African descent. The Supreme court couldn’t find any differences in the train cars, yet separate facilities for blacks had a decrease in quality.

On June 7th, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a Louisiana train with a first class ticket. Plessy was one-eighth black, and was therefore an easily white-passing man. When he seated himself in the whites-only carriage of the train, he was soon forcibly removed and placed under arrest. The reason for his imprisonment was for ‘violating an act of the General Assembly of the State,’ as specified in the Supreme Court’s transcript of the Plessy v. Ferguson case. At the time, a law was in place in the state of Louisiana dictating that people of color and whites must sit in separate train carriages.

There are many reasons why John Thomas Scopes’ Monkey Trial was important to Tennessee history. This was a major case for the state of Tennessee and I believe that it is very important to our history. The trial was just after World War 1 the year 1925 was very brutal for America and the Scopes Trial made it no better. We were recovering from World War 1 when Scopes was arrested and prosecuted for something he did in his own classroom. He didn’t think that he should have to run his classroom like the government wanted him to.

The U.S. Supreme Court is affirmed by ruling in favor of Ferguson ruling that mandatory racial segregation was not in violation of the 14th Amendment. During the court appeal the term “separate, but equal was never used; therefore, the court’s ruling was able to established that principle as a means of justifying segregation. The stamp of approval was placed on the doctrine of “separate but equal” because Homer Plessy’s 13th and 14th Amendment arguments were rejected.

During the early 1950s throughout the late 1960s the Warren Court era extensively influenced the perspective of American society and its constitutional laws. During this period the Warren Court also sought out to revolutionize perspectives on discrimination based on race and economic class, limitations of citizens within the United States, and expansion of rights due to criminal injustice. The approach of the Warren Court on these subjects stated above benefited the american society due to the outcomes of the Warren Court rulings in this era. Warren Court had an immense impact on US society for instance Brown V. Board of Education which the concluding ruling ended segregation in schools between minority groups and caucasians. This ruling had a tremendous affect on society as the minority groups in the United States felt as if they were on the brink of equality and closer to desegregation.

L. Mencken's article "The Scopes Trial: Aftermath," he states how, while it may be the right of every person to hold the beliefs/religion/superstitions they may choose for themselves, they have NO right to force their own viewpoints and beliefs onto others, as that infringes upon their right to have different beliefs (Mencken). This pointed out to the American public the unconstitutional actions of the fundamentalist South, and many realized it was time for, at least a small, change. The effect the Scopes Trial had on education in America is clear. Before the trial, it was the commonly held belief that evolution should not be taught in the public school system because of its undermining of the religious concept of creation. This famous court case was really the first time anyone had publicly second-guessed their deeply held fundamental beliefs (such as the prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan).

Plessy vs. Ferguson, one of the bigger cases in the turning point for rights, gave the black community a big boost forward. There was a man named Homer Adoph Plessy that had a problem with the way things were going at the time and he wanted equal rights. But there was another man named John Ferguson who thought that everything was just skippy. They went to court to settle their quarrel.

For nearly a century, the United States was occupied by the racial segregation of black and white people. The constitutionality of this “separation of humans into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life” had not been decided until a deliberate provocation to the law was made. The goal of this test was to have a mulatto, someone of mixed blood, defy the segregated train car law and raise a dispute on the fairness of being categorized as colored or not. This test went down in history as Plessy v. Ferguson, a planned challenge to the law during a period ruled by Jim Crow laws and the idea of “separate but equal” without equality for African Americans. This challenge forced the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation, and in result of the case, caused the nation to have split opinions of support and

The Plessy versus Ferguson case from two different views on equal rights, Plessy thought that treating people equal meant treating them the same. However the courts said that they are giving people the same treatment, but that does not mean it has to be in the same place. The courts said that the states have the power to decide if they are going to separate the colored from the whites. Plessy still believed that treating people equally meant treating them the same. He argued that the railroads were not treating people equally, because he was not allowed to sit with the whites.

The Supreme Court’s decision amalgamated with the Reconstruction-era differentiation between civil rights and social rights in the preceding court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Conforming to Justice Henry Brown, the Fourteenth Amendment endorsed “absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality.” Congress could require the separation of the races as Brown communicated the reasoning of the laws not implying the inferiority towards either race. Plessy’s lawyer, Albion Tourgee, exhorted that the segregation regulations implied the white supremacy’s view of African American was seen as inferior.

Particularly in the South, they continued to seek opportunities to legal slavery. As a result, Southerners pass a state law, Black Codes, during reconstruction. This law restricted the civil rights and public activities of legally freed African Americans. Owning weapons, freedom of movement, and land ownerships were against Black Codes. Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), the court case that upheld authority of the state law claiming, “separate-but-equal facilities for whites and blacks” , led up to another significant factor, segregation, which arose to be controversy in mid-1900s.

Ferguson” trial played a huge role in changing American History. The trial showed how corrupt the state laws were but also showed how corrupt the court was run as well. After the trial ended, it was able to give hope to many different americans to be able to change the way we treat one another as a whole instead of the way we look. It affected the way laws were formed and how the court was able to prosecute someone not based on the color of their skin. Even though the trial was not on a huge global scale of an issue, it was truly the push that set off a wild fire for change in the near future of America.

However, it should not be forgotten that allowing the Supreme Court to assume significant involvement in shaping Civil Rights policy might lead to certain decisions that are adverse to the goals of equal treatment and non-discrimination. By looking back at past cases dealing with Civil Rights controversies, one can observe examples of decisions reached by the Court that had both positive and negative effects on the rights of suspect classes. In Plessey v. Ferguson (1896), the Court considered a Louisiana law that authorized separate railway cars for blacks and whites. Plessey argued that this statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by subjecting him to unequal treatment under the law.

In particular, times of the railroad system, the Civil War 1914-1918, The Great Depression of 1929 to the late 1930’s and Jim Crow laws 1890-1965, African Americans appealed for fairness and justice (Barnes & Bowles, 2014 ch 3.1). Descending from a line of French men and Creole women, Homer Plessy represented the mixed bloodline, light skin and may have been only one-eighth black challenged the Jim Crow law Separate Car Act (Barnes & Bowles, 2014 ch 3). Jim Crow laws systematically place African Americans in a subordinate position in society, Plessy, a member of a New Orleans citizens committee used the justice system to fight back against the impending nadir in race relations (Barnes & Bowles, 2014 ch 3). However, in 1896 the Court's decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson guided the direction of race relations in the nation for more than a half a century.

The Scopes Trial of 1925 put the Butler Act, passed in 1925 by the State of Tennessee, on the national stage. The Rhea County Courthouse was the center of the trial, situated in Dayton, Tennessee, a small town that wanted to get its name on the map. At the time of the trial, the nation was ending its time with the Progressive Era and beginning a new age called the “Roaring ‘20s”. Nationwide, circumstances and conditions had changed for the better. Calvin Coolidge, a Republican nicknamed “Silent Cal”,was the president at the time of the Scopes Trial.