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Homer Plessy Case Summary

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An incident in 1892 involving an African American man Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car breaking a Louisiana law. In 1890 the law was put into play providing for “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on its railroads. Plessy brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of criminal court for New Orleans, who upheld the law. The law later challenged by the Supreme Court on the grounds that it conflicted within the thirteenth and fourteenth amendment. The court later said that the law did not conflict with the Thirteenth amendment. The Court avoided discussion of the protection granted by the clause in the Fourteenth Amendment that forbids the states to make laws depriving citizens of their “privileges or …show more content…
The first section of the statute enacts 'that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state, shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations: provided, that this section shall not be construed to apply to street railroads. No person or persons shall be permitted to occupy seats in coaches, other than the ones assigned to them, on account of the race they belong to. By the second section it was enacted 'that the officers of such passenger trains shall have power and are hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to such passenger belongs; any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison, and any officer of any railroad insisting on assigning a passenger to a coach or compartment other than the one set aside for the race to which said passenger belongs, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to

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