Skip to main content

Explain how the Supreme Court justified the practice of segregating railroad passengers in Louisiana by race.

In this question, you are referring to the Supreme Court case of Plessy v Ferguson, which was decided in 1896.  In that case, the Court had to decide whether a Louisiana law that required whites and blacks to sit in separate train cars violated the 14th Amendment.  The Court held that it did not.  There were two main reasons for this.


First, the Court said that the 14th Amendment was meant to make blacks and whites equal in legal terms, but not in social terms.  It said that there was a difference between making sure that blacks had the right to vote and requiring that they be allowed to sit in the same train cars as whites.  The Court pointed to previous cases, including one in which segregated schools in Boston were found to be constitutional.  The Court held that the amendment was meant



…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…



In saying this, the Court asserted that there was a real difference between political rights such as voting and social rights such as the right to share public facilities.


Second, the Court said that Louisiana’s law did not imply that blacks were inferior to whites.  Instead, it was based only on the idea that the two races were different.  Although the Court did not draw this analogy, we can think of this in terms of having different bathrooms for the different sexes.  Most people do not believe that we imply that women are inferior to men when we set up separate bathrooms for them.  Why, then, would we think that separate facilities imply that blacks are inferior to whites.  The Court said that these laws only labelled blacks as inferior if black people thought they did.  In the words of the majority decision,



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 upon it.



There are, then, two main reasons ways in which the Court justified segregation.  First, it said that the 14th Amendment guaranteed only political rights and not social rights.  Second, it said that it was only in the imaginations of black people that the law implied that whites were superior.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

etymology - Origin of the greeting "Sweet dreams".

Does anybody know the etymology of the phrase "sweet dreams"? I tried googling but did not find anything satisfying. Is this a relatively new phrase of the modern world or has this been in use for some time? I think it's the latter one. Answer The OED has the interjection as "a farewell to someone going to bed" from the 20th century: 1908 Sears Roebuck Catal. 198/1 Tenor Solos..Good Bye, Sweet Dreams, Good Bye. But it goes back until at least the 19th and possibly 18th centuries. John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar, used it in his poem "Orson and Ellen; A Legendary Tale" published in 1801: Also from 1801 in The infernal Quixote (Page 287) by Charles Lucas: In the March 1776 of The Universal Magazine was published "The Serenade. A Pastoral Tale. From the German of Gesner" , where the shepherd Daphnis watches over his beloved as she sleeps and sings: The same tale appears in 1776's as Idyl XI, " Daphnis ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What are the similarities between the relationships of the characters in The Outsiders and Romeo and Juliet?

At first glance, it might appear as if the characters in  The Outsiders  by S. E. Hinton and  Romeo and Juliet  by William Shakespeare do not have much in common; however, when one isolates the core of the conflicts, it becomes clear that the relationships in both stories are rooted in rivalry and secrecy.  In both  The Outsiders  and  Romeo and Juliet , an overarching theme is rivalry. While   socioeconomic status separates the greasers from the Socs in The Outsiders , last names separates the Montagues from the Capulets, who appear to be relatively equal in terms of socioeconomic status. Due to these rivalries, there are instances of deadly interactions in both stories. In  The Outsiders , Johnny kills Bob (whether his actions were justified or not is debatable). In  Romeo and Juliet , Romeo kills Tybalt and Paris, and Tybalt kills Mercutio. These deaths have profound effects on the main characters. In Ponyboy's case, the Johnny's death and other events in the novel inspire h...
Post a Comment
Read more