Plessy v. Ferguson Primary Sources: Act, Record, and Opinions

The primary sources for Plessy v. Ferguson are the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act, the Transcript of Record from the Louisiana courts, and the Supreme Court’s decision at 163 U.S. 537, which contains both Justice Henry Billings Brown’s majority opinion and Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent. All of these documents survive in federal archives and free legal databases, and a researcher can read every word of the decision itself online in a few minutes.

Where to Read the Original Documents

The full text of the 1896 decision, including both opinions, is available through several free sources. The Library of Congress hosts a digitized version of the United States Reports volume containing 163 U.S. 537.¹²³

For the original case files, briefs, and handwritten documents, the collection to consult is Record Group 267 at the National Archives, which holds the Supreme Court’s historical records from 1772 through 1997.⁴ The National Archives has digitized the original judgment document and made it available through its online catalog and its milestone documents portal.⁵ University law libraries often hold digitized copies of the Transcript of Record and the attorneys’ briefs; the fastest way to locate them is a catalog search on the case title or the citation 163 U.S. 537.

The Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890

The statute at the center of the case is Louisiana Acts of 1890, No. 111, known as the Separate Car Act. It required every railroad operating passenger service within the state to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races,” either through separate coaches or a partition dividing a single coach.³ No passenger could sit in a coach assigned to the other race.

The penalties appear in the text of the act. A passenger who refused to move to the correct compartment faced a fine of twenty-five dollars or up to twenty days in the parish prison. Conductors had authority to assign passengers by race and could refuse service to anyone who would not comply. The law also shielded the railroad companies from lawsuits arising from that refusal, granting them explicit immunity for enforcing the seating rules.⁵ Reading the statute alongside the opinion is useful, because Justice Brown’s analysis tracks the statute’s own framing of separation as a neutral public-order measure.

The Transcript of Record and Lower Court Filings

As the case moved through the courts, it generated a Transcript of Record that functions as the primary factual account of the proceedings. The record includes the original petition filed by Homer Plessy in the Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans. In that petition, Plessy’s attorneys argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth Amendment by imposing a badge of servitude through forced racial separation, and violated the Fourteenth Amendment by denying equal protection and due process of law.²

Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against Plessy, holding that Louisiana could enforce the Separate Car Act for railroads operating entirely within its borders. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld that ruling, and Plessy’s counsel then brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court on a writ of error. The Transcript of Record carries the pleadings, the state’s response, and the procedural history through both Louisiana courts. Legal briefs from Plessy’s counsel and from the state accompany the record in most law library holdings.

The Majority Opinion by Justice Brown

On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 against Plessy. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority, establishing the separate but equal doctrine. Justice David Brewer did not participate.³

Brown disposed of the Thirteenth Amendment argument quickly, holding that separating the races on trains did not reestablish slavery or involuntary servitude. The Fourteenth Amendment analysis is the substance of the opinion. Brown acknowledged the amendment was “undoubtedly” meant to enforce “the absolute equality of the two races before the law,” but wrote that it “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality.”²

The Reasonableness Standard

The opinion turns on whether the Louisiana law was a “reasonable regulation.” Brown wrote that the legislature was “at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.”³ As precedent, Brown pointed to Congress itself requiring separate schools for Black children in the District of Columbia and to similar state laws that courts had upheld.²

The Passage on Stigma

The passage most worth reading in the original is Brown’s treatment of the harm caused by segregation. He wrote that if Black citizens felt the law stamped them with a “badge of inferiority,” that was “not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” He added that if the two races were ever to meet “upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals.”²

The Dissenting Opinion by Justice Harlan

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the sole dissenter. His opinion appears within the same reported decision at 163 U.S. 537 and stands as one of the most cited dissents in American legal history.³

The most famous line is this: “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”² Harlan rejected the idea that the Separate Car Act was anything other than what it plainly was: a law designed to keep Black citizens away from white citizens, dressed as a neutral public-order regulation.

The Thirteenth Amendment and Personal Liberty

Where the majority dismissed the Thirteenth Amendment argument in a few sentences, Harlan engaged it directly. He wrote that the amendment “prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude,” and treated forced racial separation on a public railroad as exactly such a badge.² He also framed the case as a matter of personal freedom, writing that when a white person and a Black person choose to sit in the same public coach, “it is their right to do so, and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each.”

The Dred Scott Comparison

Harlan predicted that the majority opinion “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.” The comparison was deliberately harsh: the 1857 Dred Scott decision, holding that Black people could not be citizens, was already regarded as one of the Court’s worst failures. One passage of the dissent surprises modern readers. Harlan noted that Chinese immigrants, barred from citizenship under federal law, could sit in a whites-only coach, while Black citizens who may have “risked their lives for the preservation of the Union” could not. The passage shows the limits of Harlan’s own view of racial equality even as it sharpens his constitutional argument about citizenship.

Reading Plessy Alongside Brown v. Board of Education

The separate but equal doctrine stood for fifty-eight years. In 1954, the Supreme Court overruled it in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, with Chief Justice Earl Warren writing for a unanimous Court: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”⁶

Reading the two decisions side by side is one of the most instructive exercises in American constitutional law. Where Brown treated custom and tradition as evidence of reasonableness, the 1954 Court treated the same customs as evidence of harm. Harlan’s language echoes throughout the later decision, and legal historians have long noted that his reasoning ultimately carried the day.

1
Library of Congress. Plessy v. Ferguson
2
Cornell Law Institute. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537
3
Justia. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
4
National Archives. Records of the Supreme Court of the United States
5
National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
6
National Archives. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)