Day Three: The Plessy Case
by Tona H - February 4th, 2012
Last Monday, we suggested that the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case is (yet another) endpoint to Reconstruction. With it, the last practical enforcement of nearly any part of the Radical Republican’s program for black civil rights disappeared and it marked the beginning of a 50-year period of Jim Crow state legislation across the South. This is the “racial nadir,” the codification of racial segregation and legal inferiority of Americans of color.
Please read and bring with you the slender (but packed!) Bedford book on the case.
Note: this photograph is NOT of Homer Plessy (although it shows up all over the web as his portrait), but rather Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, who briefly served as the state’s first non-white governor during the Reconstruction era in 1872-1873. Just to clarify. I have made the same mistake myself.
And here are some additional links and resources we may use in class:
Brief bio of Plessy, New Orleans Public Library, “Notable African Americans from Louisiana”
“Plessy and Ferguson: Descendants of a Divisive Supreme Court Decision Unite,” Washington Post 5 June 2011
Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) at Oyez Project
Plessy v. Ferguson at Our Documents
Related lesson plans, by Karen Wolff from the Yale-New Haven CT Teachers Institute
Constitutional Conflicts: The Road to Brown, on Doug Linder’s site “Exploring Constitutional Law”
Jim Crow Gateway Resources on Plessy v. Ferguson
The Plessy case on Streetlaw.org
Texas HS Civics online lesson on the case (Oyez, Oyez, Oh Yay! – created by the State Bar of Texas)
3.5 minute resource video on the case, from PBS “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow,” posted on the Teacher’s Domain
Charles Thompson, “Harlan’s Great Dissent,” Kentucky Humanities 1996 (1), posted at the Brandeis School of Law
