My Amazon Review of Steven Luxenberg's "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation"

Betrayal

Washington Post journalist Steve Luxenberg has written an important book as to how the “separate but equal” doctrine was codified by the Supreme Court in 1896 that for all practical purposes legalized the Jim Crow laws of the South thereby betraying the promise of the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution. He tells this story through the biographies of the dissenting Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the majority opinion writer Henry Billings Brown, the lead plaintiff attorney Albion Tourgee and the history of the free mixed-race community that grew up in pre-Civil War New Orleans, of which Homer Plessy was a member.

The two heroes of the book are Harlan and Tourgee. Harlan was the slaveholding son of Kentucky’s Whig aristocracy who while supporting slavery opposed the dissolution of the Union and fought on the Union side during the Civil War. Tourgee was an Ohio lawyer who fought for the Union and later became a judge in the Reconstruction South.  Massachusetts born Brown, on the other hand, bought his way out of Civil War service and became a judge in Michigan. Of special interest is the milieu of the mixed race New Orleans community who fought with Andrew Jackson in famous battle of New Orleans and how it evolved over the 19^th century.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a set-up case orchestrated by Tourgee to overturn Louisiana’s separate car rule which kept black people out of the white’s only cars at the sole discretion of the conductor. How was a conductor to tell whether a light-skinned Negro was black or white? Nevertheless that was part of his job. Also of interest is the fact that the railroads did not like the separate car rule either. It cost them money. As a result both the Louisville & Nashville RR earlier and later the Eastern Louisiana RR fully cooperated with Tourgee in causing Plessy’s removal from the whites’ only car to set-up the case. Clearly the railroads, at least in the 1890s, were not the handmaidens of segregation.

What is remembered today is Justice Harlan’s famous quote that came out of his ringing dissent: “Our Constitution is color-blind.” Would that be true today? Luxenberg has written an important history. To me it was way too detailed and way too long, but at many points he reveals himself to be a very fine writer.

The Full amazon URL is: https://www.amazon.com/review/RAIR48142PPMZ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv