A History of the Civil Rights Movement

HOW THE MOVEMENT BEGAN

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judge, John H. Ferguson, rejected this argument. Ferguson found Plessy guilty of violating the Separate Car Act and ordered him to pay a $25 fine. Plessy appealed the decision. But the Louisiana State Supreme Court sided with Ferguson. After another appeal, the case landed before the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in the case known as Plessy v. Ferguson . By a 7–1 majority, the Court found that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act didn’t go against the Constitution. The jus tices admitted that the purpose of the 14th Amendment “was undoubted ly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law.” But, in the Court’s opinion, the amendment 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 requir ing, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other. In other words, the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equality before the law didn’t mean that African Americans were entitled to use the same public facilities as whites. It only meant that blacks had to be provided with public facilities that were similar to the ones whites used. “Separate but equal” treatment of the races, the Court said, was perfectly legal. With the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, Jim Crow had the legal blessing of the Supreme Court. Throughout the South, and sometimes even in other states, more laws were passed to enforce racial segregation. But the idea that the separate accommodations provided to blacks were equal to those enjoyed by whites was fiction. Jim Crow ensured that African Americans remained second-class citizens. Nearly 60 years would pass before the civil rights movement began to change the situation.