The Chief Justice in Plessy v. Ferguson was Melville Weston Fuller, the eighth Chief Justice of the United States. Fuller did not write the opinion, but he joined the seven-to-one majority on May 18, 1896, that upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act and gave constitutional cover to the “separate but equal” doctrine.1Justia. Plessy v. Ferguson
Who Melville Fuller Was
Fuller became Chief Justice in 1888, nominated by President Grover Cleveland and confirmed by the Senate that July.2Justia. Melville Weston Fuller Court (1888-1910) Before the appointment, he had built a successful Chicago law practice representing banks, railroads, real estate interests, and prominent business figures. That background shaped his approach on the bench. Fuller favored strict constitutional construction, limited federal reach, and broad respect for state authority to regulate their own affairs.
The Court he led reflected those priorities across twenty-two years. Fuller ran it with administrative efficiency and a collaborative style that produced consensus on many major decisions. On questions of race, that judicial philosophy carried heavy consequences. Treating segregation as a matter of local governance rather than federal constitutional concern meant states had wide room to legislate racial separation, and the Fuller Court used that room.
Fuller’s Role in the Decision
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion. Fuller joined it, along with Justices Stephen Johnson Field, Horace Gray, George Shiras Jr., Edward Douglass White, and Rufus Wheeler Peckham.1Justia. Plessy v. Ferguson Justice David Josiah Brewer missed the case due to a family emergency. Only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented.
Fuller did not write separately. He saw nothing in the Louisiana law that troubled his reading of the Constitution, and Brown’s opinion already reflected the principles Fuller had spent his career advancing. For a Chief Justice whose defining commitment was keeping the federal government out of state business, upholding a state-enacted segregation law fit comfortably within his broader worldview. His role in Plessy was that of the presiding justice who supplied a vote and signed on to the reasoning without amendment.
What the Majority Fuller Joined Actually Held
Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act required railroad companies to provide separate passenger coaches for white and Black riders, with a twenty-five-dollar fine or up to twenty days in jail for passengers who sat in the wrong car.3National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Homer Plessy, arrested in a prearranged test of the law on June 7, 1892, challenged it under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The majority’s reasoning rested on a narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Brown acknowledged that the amendment was meant to enforce legal equality between the races, but argued it was never intended to abolish distinctions based on color or to force social mixing.1Justia. Plessy v. Ferguson The opinion drew a hard line between political equality, which the Constitution protected, and social equality, which it supposedly did not. Under this framework, a state could separate the races in public spaces as long as the facilities were roughly comparable.
The Court also rejected the Thirteenth Amendment argument, holding that a legal distinction between races based on color had no tendency to reestablish involuntary servitude. On the psychological harm of segregation, Brown wrote that if Black citizens felt stamped with a badge of inferiority, it was only because they chose to interpret the law that way.3National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) The opinion added that legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or abolish distinctions based on physical differences. This was the reasoning Fuller endorsed when he joined the majority.
The Lone Dissent
Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only member of the Fuller Court to reject the majority’s logic. Harlan argued that the Constitution does not permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to the protection of civil rights. His most famous passage read: “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. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”1Justia. Plessy v. Ferguson
Harlan warned that the decision would encourage states to pass increasingly aggressive discriminatory laws. He called the Louisiana statute inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens and argued that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited not just slavery itself but any burdens or disabilities that constituted badges of servitude. Where Fuller and the majority saw a reasonable exercise of state police power, Harlan saw a system of racial domination that the Reconstruction Amendments were designed to prevent.
What the Fuller Court’s Ruling Enabled
The decision did what Harlan predicted. With the Supreme Court’s blessing, states across the South enacted an expanding body of segregation laws reaching far beyond railroad cars. Schools, theaters, restaurants, hospitals, parks, and public transportation were all divided by race, with the same structure each time: separate facilities, nominally equal, enforced by criminal penalties.
The damage extended past physical separation. States used the same period of judicial permissiveness to erect barriers to Black political participation through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses that effectively reversed the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee of voting rights. These measures remained entrenched across much of the South until federal legislation dismantled them in the 1960s. By treating segregation as a local matter beyond federal concern, the seven justices in the majority, Fuller among them, ensured that states could build and enforce racial hierarchies with almost no judicial check for generations.
When the Ruling Was Overturned
The separate but equal doctrine survived for fifty-eight years. In Brown v. Board of Education, decided unanimously on May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson “has no place in the field of public education.”4National Archives. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Separating children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprived minority children of equal educational opportunities, the Court held, even when the physical facilities were identical.
Warren’s opinion explicitly rejected the Fuller Court’s reasoning. Rather than evaluating the Fourteenth Amendment based on conditions in 1868, the Brown Court assessed segregation in light of the full development of public education and its present place in American life.4National Archives. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Where the Fuller Court had dismissed the psychological harm of segregation, Warren and his colleagues acknowledged it as real and constitutionally significant. Separate educational facilities, the Court concluded, are inherently unequal.5United States Courts. History – Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment Brown directly overruled Plessy in public education and effectively gutted its reasoning across every area of public life, dismantling the legal architecture Fuller had helped sanction in 1896.