Does a state law requiring equal but separate railway accommodations for white and colored passengers violate the Thirteenth Amendment or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Louisiana passed an 1890 statute requiring railway companies carrying passengers within the state to provide equal but separate accommodations for white and colored races, either through separate coaches or partitioned compartments. Passengers were assigned to the coach for their race. A passenger insisting on occupying a coach not assigned to his race faced a $25 fine or up to twenty days in jail, and railway officers who refused to enforce the assignment faced similar penalties. Nurses attending children of the other race were exempt.

Homer Plessy, who was seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African in descent, with no discernible African ancestry in appearance, took a seat in a vacant coach for white passengers on a train traveling between two stations within Louisiana. The conductor ordered him to move to the coach for colored persons. Plessy refused, was forcibly ejected with the aid of a police officer, and was jailed to answer a charge of violating the act. The East Louisiana Railway was a purely local line with both termini in Louisiana. Plessy contended that the statute violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Plessy was charged by information in the criminal District Court with violating the Louisiana separate-car statute. He filed a petition for a writ of prohibition in the Louisiana courts, arguing that the act was unconstitutional under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court of Louisiana upheld the statute's constitutionality and denied relief. Plessy brought a writ of error to the United States Supreme Court. Justice Brewer did not participate.

(Brown, J.)

No. A state law requiring equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races on intrastate railways does not violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendment.

The Thirteenth Amendment is not implicated. Slavery means a state of bondage and involuntary servitude, and a law that merely distinguishes between the races by color does not reestablish servitude or destroy legal equality. Slaughter-house Cases, 16 Wall. 36; Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3.

The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but not to abolish distinctions based on color or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality. Laws requiring separation where the races are likely to be in contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race and fall within the state's police power. Separate schools for white and colored children, upheld in Roberts v. City of Boston and many later cases, are the most common example. Similar railway separation statutes had been sustained in many state and federal courts, and Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway v. Mississippi, 133 U.S. 587, was nearly directly on point.

The test is whether the statute is a reasonable regulation, and the legislature has wide discretion to act with reference to established usages, customs, and traditions and to promote comfort and public peace. Measured by that standard, separation in public conveyances is reasonable. The claim that enforced separation stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority rests on the construction the colored race chooses to put on the act, not on anything in it. Social prejudices cannot be overcome by legislation, and equal civil and political rights do not require an enforced commingling of the races.

Plessy's claim that reputation as a white man is property is unavailing: a white man wrongly assigned to the colored coach may sue for damages, and a colored man loses no property he is entitled to. The judgment is affirmed.

Dissent (Harlan, J.) The Constitution is color-blind and tolerates no caste among citizens. The statute regulates the use of a public highway by citizens solely on the basis of race, and every one knows its purpose is to exclude colored people from coaches assigned to whites. That is a badge of servitude inconsistent with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and with the personal liberty of all citizens. Courts do not weigh the reasonableness of legislation as policy, but a race-based classification of civil rights is beyond legislative power. If the statute is valid, a state could equally segregate streets, courtrooms, or jury boxes. The majority answered that every exercise of the police power must be reasonable and in good faith, and that any badge of inferiority exists only because the colored race chooses to read it into the act. The decision will prove as pernicious as Dred Scott, will encourage aggression against the rights of colored citizens, and will plant the seeds of race hate under the sanction of law. The thin disguise of equal accommodations will mislead no one.