In May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana's Separate Car Act, which required railroads to provide separate but equal cars to white and “colored” passengers. At the time, the case, Plessy v. Ferguson, drew little attention outside the black press. Today it is best known as the precedent that the Supreme Court overruled in Brown v. Board of Education, its 1954 decision that separate is inherently unequal in the context of segregated public schools.
Steve Luxenberg's Separate, a history of Plessy, shows that there was virtually nothing surprising about the decision. Segregation—on trains and steamboats, in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and political associations—was a shameful but nearly ubiquitous fact of American life. For many white Americans, including those on the Supreme Court, it was also “in the nature of things,” as the court put it in Plessy. Homer Plessy's challenge to the legality of the practice was quixotic, even after the enactment of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which ended slavery and required equal protection under the law. Nor was segregation just a Southern phenomenon; it was widely accepted, practiced, and enforced throughout the nation. The Supreme Court that upheld it in Plessy consisted of seven Northern justices and one from the South. Yet the decision was 7-1, and the only dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, was also the court's lone Southerner.
Luxenberg's richly detailed portrait of America's most turbulent time reveals why the case was such a long shot. The political groundwork necessary to challenge settled expectations had simply not been done yet. The country had fought a bloody civil war and formally abolished slavery, but this did not mean that most white citizens were comfortable traveling in the same circles or on the same train cars as the newly freed slaves. Even the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection was not widely thought to end segregation; indeed, the Congress that ratified the amendment had segregated seating for visitors, and no member suggested that the practice would end with the amendment's ratification. Read from the vantage point of 2019, when racial inequality stubbornly persists, Luxenberg's account provides a vivid reminder of how intransigent racial inequality has been and of the need to counter it through political as well as legal means.
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