David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, has an interesting article in The Nation on the “Grim Road to Plessy v. Ferguson.” Cole writes of Plessy:
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.
You can find the article here.
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