Editing Plessy v. Ferguson (section)

==Significance==
[[File:Negro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by Russell Lee.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|An [[Oklahoma City]] streetcar terminal's "colored" drinking fountain, 1939<ref>{{cite web|last=Lee|first=Russell|title=Negro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma|work=Prints & Photographs Online Catalog|publisher=[[Library of Congress]] Home|date=July 1939|url=https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1997026728/PP/|access-date=March 23, 2005}}</ref>]]''Plessy'' legitimized state laws establishing "racial" segregation in the [[Southern United States|South]] and provided an impetus for further segregation laws. It also legitimized laws in the North requiring "racial" segregation, such as in the Boston school segregation case noted by Justice Brown in his majority opinion.<ref>{{cite book|last=Brands|first=H. W.|title=American Colossus|location=New York|publisher=Anchor Books|date=2010|page=466}}</ref> Legislative achievements won during the [[Reconstruction Era]] were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine.<ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/07/segregation-and-the-supreme-court/6055|title=Segregation and the Supreme Court|last=Sutherland| first=Arthur E. Jr. |author-link=Arthur E. Sutherland Jr.|magazine=The Atlantic Monthly|date=July 1954}}</ref> The doctrine had been strengthened also by an 1875 Supreme Court decision that limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs, guaranteeing to Congress only the power "to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation".<ref name="oldfield">{{cite journal |last1=Oldfield |first1=John |title=State politics, railroads, and Civil Rights in South Carolina, 1883–89 |journal=American Nineteenth Century History |date=January 2004 |volume=5 |issue=2 |pages=71–91 |doi=10.1080/1466465042000257864 |s2cid=144234514 }}</ref> The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of "race", guaranteeing the states' right to implement racially separate institutions, requiring them only to be equal.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/separate-but-equal.html|title=Separate But Equal: The Law of the Land|publisher=Smithsonian National Museum of American History Behring Center}}</ref>

[[File:JimCrowCar2.jpg|left|upright=1.2|thumb|1904 caricature of "White" and "[[Jim Crow]]" rail cars by [[John T. McCutcheon]]]]Despite the pretense of "separate but equal", non-whites essentially always received inferior facilities and treatment, if they received them at all.<ref>{{cite book|last=McCutheon|first=John |title=The Mysterious Stranger and Other Cartoons|publisher=McClure, Phillips & Co.|date=1905}}</ref>{{page needed|date=May 2021}}
The prospect of greater state influence in matters of race worried numerous advocates of civil equality, including Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, who wrote in his ''Plessy'' dissent, "we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law, when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master."<ref name="oldfield"/> Harlan's concerns about the encroachment on the 14th Amendment would prove well-founded; states proceeded to institute segregation-based laws that became known as the [[Jim Crow laws|Jim Crow system]].<ref>{{cite news |last1=Krock |first1=Arthur |title=In The Nation; An Historic Day in the Supreme Court |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1950/06/06/archives/in-the-nation-an-historic-day-in-the-supreme-court.html |work=The New York Times |date=6 June 1950 }}</ref> In addition, from 1890 to 1908, Southern states passed new or amended constitutions including provisions that effectively [[Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era|disenfranchised]] blacks and thousands of poor whites.

Some commentators, such as [[Gabriel J. Chin]]{{sfn|Chin|1996}} and Eric Maltz,<ref name="Maltz">{{cite journal|last=Maltz|first=Eric|title=Only Partially Color-Blind: John Marshall Harlan's View of Race and the Constitution|journal=Georgia State L. Rev.|date=1996|volume=12|page=973}}</ref> have viewed Harlan's ''Plessy'' dissent in a more critical light, and suggested it be viewed in context with his other decisions.{{sfn|Chin|1996}} Maltz has argued that "modern commentators have often overstated Harlan's distaste for race-based classifications", pointing to other aspects of decisions in which Harlan was involved.{{sfn|Maltz|1996|p=1015}} Both point to a passage of Harlan's ''Plessy'' dissent as particularly troubling:{{sfn|Chin|1996|p=156}}{{sfn|Maltz|1996|p=1002}} <blockquote>There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union{{nbsp}}... and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.<ref name="justia">{{cite web|url=http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/case.html|title=Plessy v. Ferguson – 163 U.S. 537 (1896) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center|publisher=Supreme.justia.com|access-date=December 22, 2012}}</ref></blockquote>

New Orleans historian Keith Weldon Medley, author of ''We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson, The Fight Against Legal Segregation'', said the words in Justice Harlan's "Great Dissent" were taken from papers filed with the court by "The Citizen's Committee".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.wwltv.com/video/news-index.html?nvid=330530|title=Civil rights pioneer celebrated with marker|date=February 10, 2009|format=Flash|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090221103101/http://www.wwltv.com/video/news-index.html?nvid=330530|archive-date=February 21, 2009}}</ref>

The effect of the ''Plessy'' ruling was immediate; there were already significant differences in funding for the segregated school system, which continued into the 20th century; states consistently underfunded black schools, providing them with substandard buildings, textbooks, and supplies. States which had successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased reconstruction era efforts.<ref name="0-lib.myilibrary.com.mercury.concordia.ca">{{cite book|url=http://0-lib.myilibrary.com.mercury.concordia.ca/Browse/open.asp?ID=56001&loc=19|title=From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality|last=Klarman|first=Michael J.|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2004|access-date=February 1, 2010|url-access=registration}}</ref>{{rp|16–18}} The principles of ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' were affirmed in ''[[Lum v. Rice]]'' (1927), which upheld the right of a [[Mississippi]] public school for white children to exclude a [[Chinese American]] girl. Despite the laws enforcing [[compulsory education]], and the lack of public schools for Chinese children in Lum's area, the Supreme Court ruled that she had the choice to attend a [[private school]].<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of African American Education|title=Gong Lum v. Rice|first=Aama|last=Nahuja|volume=1|editor1-first=Kofi|editor1-last=Lomotey|publisher=SAGE|year=2009|page=291}}</ref> Jim Crow laws and practices spread northward in response to a second wave of African-American migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities. Some established [[de jure]] segregated educational facilities, separate public institutions such as hotels and restaurants, separate beaches among other public facilities, and restrictions on interracial marriage, but in other cases segregation in the North was related to unstated practices and operated on a [[de facto]] basis, although not by law, among numerous other facets of daily life.<ref name="0-lib.myilibrary.com.mercury.concordia.ca"/>{{rp|6}}

The separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African-American community were consistently inferior<ref>{{cite news |last1=White |first1=Walter |title=Decision in Plessy Case |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1954/03/10/archives/decision-in-plessy-case.html |work=The New York Times |date=10 March 1954 }}</ref> to those provided to the White community. This contradicted the vague declaration of "separate but equal" issued after the ''Plessy'' decision.<ref>{{cite journal |id={{ProQuest|222201716}} |last=Darden |first=Gary Helm |date=2009 |title=The New Empire in the 'New South': Jim Crow in the Global Frontier of High Imperialism and Decolonization |journal=Southern Quarterly |volume=46 |number=3 |pages=8–25 }}</ref> Since no state wrote the "separate but equal" doctrine into a statute, there was no remedy, other than going back to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the separate facilities were not equal, and states faced no consequences if they underfunded services and facilities for non-whites.{{citation needed|date=May 2021}}

From 1890 to 1908, state legislatures in the South disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through rejecting them for voter registration and voting: making voter registration more difficult by providing more detailed records, such as proof of land ownership or [[literacy tests]] administered by white staff at poll stations. African-American community leaders, who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era and even into the 1880s, lost gains made when their voters were excluded from the political system. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject that "lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, [[Poll tax (United States)|poll taxes]], [[white primaries]], and [[grandfather clauses]] were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme", notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Mcwilliams |first1=Wilson Carey |title=On Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals |journal=Studies in American Political Development |date=1999 |volume=13 |issue=1 |pages=216–229 |doi=10.1017/S0898588X9900200X |doi-broken-date=December 24, 2024 |s2cid=143449197 }}</ref>

In ''[[Brown v. Board of Education]]'' (1954), the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483|title=Brown v. Board of Education|work=cornell.edu}}</ref> While ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' was never explicitly overruled by the Supreme Court, it is effectively dead as a precedent;<ref>{{cite web|last=Amar|first=Akhil Reed|title=Anthony Kennedy and the Ghost of Earl Warren|website=slate.com|publisher=Slate Magazine|date=July 6, 2015|url=http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/07/06/obergefell_v_hodges_anthony_kennedy_continues_the_legacy_of_earl_warren.html|access-date=July 22, 2015}}</ref> the [[Interstate Commerce Commission]] ruled that segregation on interstate transport violated the [[Interstate Commerce Act of 1887|Interstate Commerce Act]] in the 1955 case ''[[Keys v. Carolina Coach Co.|Keys v. Carolina Coach Co]]''. The [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] prohibited legal segregation and the [[Voting Rights Act]] of 1965 provided for federal oversight and enforcement of voter registration and voting.{{citation needed|date=May 2021}}

===Plessy and Ferguson Foundation===
In 2009, Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of participants on both sides of the 1896 Supreme Court case, announced the establishment of the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. The foundation would work to create new ways to teach the history of civil rights through film, art, and public programs designed to create understanding of this historic case and its effect on the American conscience.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nocca.com/newsevents/newsletter.php?newsletter_ID=188|title=A Celebration of Progress: Unveiling the long-awaited historical marker for the arrest site of Homer Plessy|publisher=New Orleans Center for Creative Arts|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090221095135/http://www.nocca.com/newsevents/newsletter.php?newsletter_ID=188|archive-date=February 21, 2009}}</ref>

In 2009, a marker was placed<ref name=plessy&ferg>{{cite news|url=http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/02/plessy_vs_ferguson_photo.html|title=Plessy and Ferguson unveil plaque today marking their ancestors' actions|last=Reckdahl|first=Katy|newspaper=[[The Times-Picayune]]|date=February 11, 2009}}</ref> at the corner of Press and Royal streets in New Orleans, where Plessy had been removed from his train.<ref name="plaque-dedicated">{{cite web|url=http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wwno/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1468970|title=Plessy/Ferguson plaque dedicated|last=Abrams|first=Eve|date=February 12, 2009|access-date=January 14, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120129224157/http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wwno/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1468970|archive-date=January 29, 2012}}</ref>
{{Clear}}

===Pardon===
In 2021, the Louisiana Board of Pardons unanimously approved a posthumous pardon of Plessy, sending it to Governor [[John Bel Edwards]] for final approval.<ref>{{cite news
|title=Louisiana board votes to pardon Homer Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson
|newspaper=[[Washington Post]]
|date=Nov 12, 2021
|first=Gillian
|last=Brockell
|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/11/12/homer-plessy-pardon-ferguson-louisiana/}}</ref> Edwards granted the pardon on January 5, 2022.<ref>{{Cite web|author=Tina Burnside|title=Homer Plessy, of Plessy v. Ferguson's 'separate but equal' ruling, pardoned by Louisiana|url=https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/05/us/plessy-pardon-signed-by-governor/index.html|access-date=2022-01-05|website=CNN|date=January 5, 2022 }}</ref>