and 14. th. Abstract. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. In 1892, they arranged for Homer Adolph Plessy to be arrested on an East Louisiana Railway train for refusing to move to the car designated for “colored passengers.” The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 as Plessy v. Ferguson (named for the judge who first ruled against Plessy). At issue was a Louisiana law compelling segregation of the races in rail coaches. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the lone objector was Justice John Marshall Harlan. The adjudged cases in which statutes have been held to be void because unreasonable are those in which the means employed by the legislature were not at all germane to the end to which the legislature was competent. The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases. But however construed, the intent of the legislature is to be respected if the particular statute in question is valid, although the courts, looking at the public interests, may conceive the statute to be both unreasonable and impolitic. May 18, 1996, marks the 100th anniversary of Justice John Marshall Harlan's famous dissenting words in Plessy v. Ferguson that the "Constitution is color-blind." It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with the state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law. No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary. The answer given at the argument to these questions was that regulations of the kind they suggest would be unreasonable and could not, therefore, stand before the law. RE-READING JUSTICE HARLAN'S DISSENT IN PLESSY V. FERGUSON: FREEDOM, ANTIRACISM, AND CITIZENSHIP T. Alexander Aleinikoff* Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson I has become an impor- tant cultural text in late twentieth century America. Justice Benjamin Curtis wrote a forceful dissent about the travesty of this decision. Not until 1954 did the Supreme Court accept Harlan’s arguments, when it reversed Plessy v. Ferguson with its Brown v. Board of Education decision. In order to regain admittance into the Union the former Confederate states needed to But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race. Source: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163, U.S. 537 (1896). . Am 7. In 1890, Louisiana passed a law compelling railways to “provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races,” joining several southern states that had already passed similar laws. If laws of like character should be enacted in the several states of the Union, the effect would be in the highest degree mischievous. Finally, and to the end that no citizen should be denied on account of his race the privilege of participating in the political control of his country, it was declared by the Fifteenth Amendment that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”, These notable additions to the fundamental law were welcomed by the friends of liberty throughout the world. If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street and black citizens to keep on the other? . They had, as this Court has said, a common purpose; namely, to secure “to a race recently emancipated, a race that through many generations have been held in slavery, all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy.” They declared, in legal effect, this Court has further said, “that the law in the states shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the states, and. He served as a Union officer in the Civil War, and following the war, he became involved in politics, aligned with the Republican Party. But that amendment having been found inadequate to the protection of the rights of those who had been in slavery, it was followed by the Fourteenth Amendment, which added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship and to the security of personal liberty by declaring that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,” and that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”, These two amendments, if enforced according to their true intent and meaning, will protect all the civil rights that pertain to freedom and citizenship. 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