Plessy Vs. Ferguson case :
In 1890's, there was a segregation law in Louisiana stating that blacks and whites both are seperated in different but equal train cars. On June 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to move from the white train cart and go to black train car. As a African American, he was required under the state law to move. In 1892 Homer Adolph Plessy was a thirty-year old shoemaker from New Orleans, Louisiana. He was only 1/8 Black (he had an African American great-grandmother) and he and his entire family passed as White, but the State of Louisiana considered him Black. Plessy was asked by the Citizen s Committee (a New Orleans political group composed of African Americans and Creoles like Plessy) to help them challenge the newly enacted Separate Car Act, a Louisiana law that separated Blacks from Whites in railroad cars. The penalty for sitting in the wrong car was either 20 days in jail or a $25 fine. Mr.Home went along with it. He defiantly sat in the "white" section of the car and refused to get up. So Mr.Home was indeed, arrested. He spent the night in the local jail and was released the next morning on bond. The citizens committee already got a attorney named Albion W. Tourgee. Plessy s case went to trial a month after his arrest and Tourgee argued that Plessy 's civil rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution had been violated. While Judge John Ferguson had once ruled against separate cars for interstate railroad travel (different states had different outlooks on segregation), he ruled against Plessy in this case because he believed that the state had a right to set segregation policies within its own boundaries. Mr.Tourgee took the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court. In 1869, the Plessy Vs. Ferguson case reviewed by the supreme court. The supreme court had also ruled against Plessy. The Justice Henry Brown wrote that:
"The thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery...is too clear for argument...A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races...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."
Mr.home had not won the case and the "separate but equal" law was later struck down by the Brown Vs.The Board Of Education case. Mr.home later got a job as a
insurance agent and died in 1925 in his early sixties.