Plessy v. Ferguson mock trial

On tuesday we did a mock trial Plessy v. Ferguson sadly my team lost again. This time instead of doing the religious side I did it based on the law side of the case. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a ticket on a train from New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana, and took a vacant seat in a whites-only car. After refusing to leave the car at the conductor’s insistence, he was arrested and jailed. Convicted by a New Orleans court of violating the 1890 law, The state law of Louisiana was arguing that Plessy being a colored man didn't give him the right to sit on the whites-only train car under the Separate Car Act. The state also made the argument that Plessy knew what he was doing was illegal and should be punished for it. Under Louisiana law he was classified as black and was required to sit in the “colored” section which he refused to follow the rule which he violated the Louisiana separate car act. the majority says , the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full and equal rights of citizenship to African Americans. The Separate Car Act did not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, it did not reestablish slavery or constitute a “badge” of slavery or servitude. In reaching this conclusion he relied on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Civil Rights Cases , which found that racial discrimination against African Americans in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement “imposes no badge of slavery or involuntary servitude…but at most, infringes rights which are protected from State aggression by the 14th Amendment.” legal equality was adequately respected in the act because the accommodations provided for each race were required to be equal and because the racial segregation of passengers did not by itself imply the legal inferiority of either race.

During the trial my team member Nick Adams stated that since 1871, almost 170,000 miles have been added to our growing railway system here in America. Since the end of the Civil War, our nation's public debt has skyrocketed to over 5 billion dollars and climbing in the last 30 years. Making our railway system a vital part of rebuilding the Southern Economy since the end of the Civil War. This is why we now rely so heavily on the importance of having a well-organized railroad system. This is exactly what Mr. Plessy is trying to dismantle.

Segregation of public transportation began in 1887 and quickly made its way to Louisiana. In one of the articles I read it stated "In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights (like voting and jury service), not “social rights” (sitting in the railroad car of your choice)."

Plessy had a lot to say and a lot to argue with when reading the majority opinion I read that "In response to Plessy’s comparison of the Separate Car Act to hypothetical statutes requiring African Americans and whites to walk on different sides of the street or to live in differently coloured houses, Brown responded that the Separate Car Act was intended to preserve “public peace and good order” and was therefore a “reasonable” exercise of the legislature’s police power."

I got to learn a lot from this case of racism. We did learn about racism in high school but never went fully into what it was like back then so I found the research I did quite interesting to read.

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