Williamjames Hull Hoffer

Of all of the discredited decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, few are as roundly condemned today as the one issued in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In upholding a Louisiana law mandating the segregation of whites and blacks on Louisiana railroads, it unleashed a flood of measures that condemned two generations of African Americans to second-class existence throughout the South. In this book, Williamjames Hull Hoffer offers a history of the decision, one that sets it in its context so as to better understand the case and the underlying forces at work within it.

Hoffer begins by introducing readers to 19th century New Orleans, a city where race relations were even more complicated than elsewhere in the South. The years of French and Spanish rule had left a sizeable community of Creoles, free persons of color. This community had a strong sense of pride in their own identity, and resented the discriminatory treatment they received in the antebellum American South. The Civil War and Reconstruction gave the Creole an opportunity to assert their legal equality, yet the end of Reconstruction soon brought a reversal of many of these gains at the hands of the “Redeemer”which took power. By the 1880s, laws appeared throughout the South heralding a return to a segregated South, one the Supreme Court endorsed in 1890 with the proviso that facilities for African Americans had to be the equal of whites.

It was the passage of the Separate Car Act soon afterward by the overwhelmingly white Louisiana state legislature in 1890 which prompted Afro-Creole community leaders to mount a legal challenge. After an initial test case was threatened by a question of applicability, Homer Plessy was recruited to serve as a litigant, with his arrest providing the case the community leaders wanted. Here Hoffer provides a good concise analysis of the legal arguments made by both sides as the case worked its way to the Supreme Court, and he explains nicely both the majority decision authored by Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown and the famous dissent penned by John Marshall Harlan. With the decision effectively endorsing segregation a horde of new laws were passed that solidified the divide between whites and African Americans, not just in the South but in other places as well, where it stood until a later Court effectively reversed its decisions in the 1950s and 1960s.

In summarizing the case with the pages of the book, Hoffer pulls off the difficult challenge of providing an account that is both concise and informative. His account of the political, legal, and social climate helps to explain the Plessy decision as a product of its time, yet one that often used a distorted reasoning in pursuit of the final result. It makes for depressing reading, yet by the end of the book the reader is left with a far better understanding of this pivotal legal decision and how it came to pass. Anyone seeking to learn about the Plessy case and its shameful legacy would do well to start with this informative book, which shines a much needed light on a dark moment in American history.… (meer)