Mock Trial

 In 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a railway car reserved for white passengers, in violation of Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890. His attorneys argue that the law violates the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

This brief lays out why, as a matter of settled law in 1896, Judge Ferguson's ruling should be upheld.

States have long held broad "police power" — the constitutional authority to pass laws protecting public health, safety, order, and welfare. The Louisiana legislature determined that requiring separate railway cars for white and colored passengers promotes public order and reduces friction between the races on common carriers. Courts have consistently held that such regulatory judgments belong to state legislatures, not to federal courts, so long as the law is reasonable and applies equally to both races.

The Separate Car Act meets that standard. It punishes white passengers who sit in colored cars just as it punishes colored passengers who sit in white cars.

That reasonableness matters because the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection of the laws, not identical or commingled accommodations. So long as the accommodations provided to colored passengers are substantially equal in quality to those provided to white passengers, the constitutional requirement is satisfied. Separation, standing alone, does not brand either race as inferior in the eyes of the law. Any feeling of inferiority, if it exists, arises — as the doctrine holds — from how members of the excluded race choose to interpret the distinction, not from anything inherent in the statute itself.

Af. American waiting on his train

This is not a novel theory invented for Louisiana's benefit. The single most important precedent supporting this position is Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198 (1850), as collected in Harvard Law School's open casebook archive. In that case, five-year-old Sarah Roberts, represented by attorney Charles Sumner, challenged the Boston School Committee's policy of maintaining separate primary schools for Black and white children. Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled against Roberts, holding that the school committee had the lawful authority to maintain separate schools, and that doing so did not violate the state constitution's guarantee of equality before the law.

As the National Park Service's summary of the case explains, Shaw found that maintaining separate schools served the good of both racial groups and reflected the honest judgment of the committee — not an act of legal discrimination. Shaw further reasoned that racial prejudice, if it exists in society, is not created by law and cannot be cured by forcing integration through the courts. This reasoning has since been adopted well beyond Massachusetts.

According to legal-history scholarship collected in the vLex law journals database, courts of at least ten states relied on Roberts as precedent for upholding segregated education, and the U.S. Supreme Court in Hall v. DeCuir (1878) cited it directly for the rule that "equality does not mean identity." Notably, this precedent was decided before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, yet it addressed the identical legal question the Amendment is meant to answer — whether separation by race, on its own, denies equal protection. It did not. If separate but substantially equal schools satisfy constitutional equality, separate but substantially equal railway cars must satisfy it as well.

Homer Plessy photograph

 Courts examining transportation specifically have likewise     distinguished equality from identity of treatment. This distinction       —  that a state may lawfully classify and separate passengers by     race so long as accommodations remain comparable — has been   applied directly to common carriers in cases arising after Roberts,   extending its schoolroom logic to railcars, streetcars, and   steamboats.

 Taken together, this authority resolves the question before the   Court. The Separate Car Act does not deny Homer Plessy equal   protection of the law. It classifies passengers reasonably, in the   legitimate exercise of Louisiana's police power, and it requires —   under penalty of law — that the accommodations for both races be   kept substantially equal. Under the binding logic of Roberts v. City   of Boston and the decades of precedent following it, this Court   should affirm that "equal" has never meant "identical," and that   Judge Ferguson's ruling was correctly decided.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used Claude AI to write this blog post as well as provide links from academic sources within the text. I also used Claude to format it as a blog post and to add a precedent case. Finally, I used Claude to generate a four minute script on strictly legal arguments to speak of in front of the class on Monday.