PL HELP ME OUT PL GIVING OUT 100 POINTS OUT WHO EVERY ANSWERS THIS CORRECTLY PLESSY V. FERGUSON: A SUMMARY

Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man who sometimes “passed” as white, took part in a plan by a small number of black professionals seeking to have a court overturn the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890. Plessy boarded a whites-only railroad car and was arrested, as per arrangement, by a private detective. The group intended to use Plessy’s light skin tone to demonstrate how arbitrary and unconstitutional the law was.

1. What law did Plessy violate?

2. How did Plessy violate this law?

Plessy’s lawyers argued that Louisiana’s segregation law violated both the Thirteenth Amendment, which bars slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees all Americans equal protection under the law.

3. Why did Plessy believe that the Separate Car Act violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment?

Louisiana courts consistently found against Plessy, and the case moved all the way to the Supreme Court. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana law requiring “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” was constitutional.

Writing for the Court’s majority, Justice Henry Brown ruled that the law did not “discriminate” among legal rights by race, but merely recognized a “distinction” between races “which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color.” …The ruling established the “separate but equal” doctrine that informs many states’ decision to segregate public facilities— schools, railcars, even drinking fountains.

4. How did the precedent set by the case affect the lives of African Americans beyond the issue of travel in railroads?