Plessy V Ferguson Case Study

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Plessy v. Ferguson was a ruling by the United State’s Supreme Court that attempted to appease both sides of the racial conflict in America. Failing in this, the court reversed the Plessy ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. With the Civil War over and slavery outlawed, tension between White and Black Americans still ran high. Sharecropping became a new form of slavery that also included most poor Whites. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were put in place to help recently freed slaves find a place in society. Caucasian Americans, especially those in the South, still viewed African Americans as inferior and treated them as such. Many Southern states passed legislation, called Jim Crow laws, that specifically took away some of the Civil Rights that the Constitution gave the African Americans. An example of this is when African Americans were required to pass a literacy test in order to vote. If they failed they were not allowed to vote. Louisiana passed a railroad segregation law which kept Caucasian Americans and African Americans separated in different railway cars. African…show more content…
He believe that just because the races were separated, the African Americans were not treated as inferior beings. After he was found guilty in the eyes of the Supreme Court, Plessy returned to New Orleans and pleaded guilty in the state’s court and was charged a fine of twenty dollars. The Plessy v. Ferguson set a precedent for future cases until the mid twentieth century. Many other states rushed to pass new Jim Crow laws that segregated White and Black Americans. Public education took the biggest hit from the “Separate but equal” doctrine. Things stayed as they were until the middle of the twentieth century when another landmark case reached the Supreme
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