Editing Plessy v. Ferguson (section)

===Opinion of the Court===
[[File:Portrait of Henry Billings Brown.jpg|thumb|upright|Justice Henry Billings Brown, author of the majority opinion in ''Plessy'']]
Seven justices formed the Court's majority and joined an opinion written by justice [[Henry Billings Brown]]. The Court first dismissed any claim that the Louisiana law violated the [[Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution|Thirteenth Amendment]], which, in the majority's opinion, did no more than ensure that black Americans had the basic level of legal equality needed to abolish slavery.{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}}

Next, the Court considered whether the law violated the [[Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution|Fourteenth Amendment]]{{'s}} [[Equal Protection Clause]], which reads: "nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Court said that although the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to guarantee the legal equality of all races in the United States, it was not intended to prevent social or other types of discrimination.{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}}
{{Blockquote
|text=The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the 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, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
|source=''Plessy'', 163 U.S. at 543–44.<ref>Quoted in {{harvp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}}.</ref> 
}}
The Court reasoned that laws requiring racial separation were within Louisiana's [[Police power (United States constitutional law)|police power]]: the core sovereign authority of U.S. states to pass laws on matters of "health, safety, and morals".{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}} It held that as long as a law that classified and separated people by their race was a reasonable and good faith exercise of a state's police power and was not designed to oppress a particular class, the law did not violate the Equal Protection Clause.{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}} According to the Court, the question in any case that involved a racial segregation law was whether the law was reasonable, and the Court gave State legislatures broad discretion to determine the reasonableness of the laws they passed.{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}}

Plessy's lawyers had argued that segregation laws inherently implied that black people were inferior and stigmatized them with a second-class status that violated the Equal Protection Clause.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;9.3.1, p. 760}} But the Court rejected this argument.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;9.3.1, p. 761}}
{{Blockquote
|text=We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.
|source=''Plessy'', 163 U.S. at 551.<ref>Quoted in {{harvp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;9.3.1, p. 761}}.</ref>
}}
The Court rejected the notion that the law marked black Americans with "a badge of inferiority", and said that racial prejudice could not be overcome by legislation.{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§ 14.8, p. 818}}