| Segregation in transportation -- Law and legislation -- Louisiana -- History -- 19th century. |
| African Americans -- Civil rights -- United States -- History -- 19th century. |
| Race discrimination -- Law and legislation -- United States -- History -- 19th century. |
| Plessy, Homer Adolph -- Trials, litigation, etc. |
| Harlan, John Marshall, 1833-1911 |
| Tourgée, Albion W., 1838-1905 |
| Brown, Henry Billings, 1836-1913 |
| Martinet, Louis A., 1849-1917 |
| Tourgée, Albion Winegar, 1838-1905 |
| One of the Fools, 1838-1905 |
| Fools, One of the, 1838-1905 |
| Brown, H. B. (Henry Billings), 1836-1913 |
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Summary
Summary
A shattering narrative of how a nation embraced "separation" and its pernicious consequences.
Plessy v. Ferguson , the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal," drew remarkably little attention when the justices announced their decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the nineteenth century.
Told through the eyes of the people caught up in the case--the New Orleans resisters who brought it, the best-selling author recruited to argue it, the justices who heard it-- Separate wends its way through a half-century of American history, beginning at the dawn of the railroad age, germinating in the soil of slavery and the Civil War, and then bursting forth in the aftermath of Reconstruction as separation took root in nearly every aspect of American life. Winner of the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, Separate is a sweeping, swiftly paced, and surprising account of our nation's most devastating divide.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the legality of "separate but equal" facilities for white and black Americans, is widely viewed as the beginning of the jim crow era in the South, but, as journalist Luxenberg convincingly argues, it was the result of decades of debate about race relations. The case of Homer Plessy, a New Orleanian "fair-skinned enough to cause confusion" about which car he should occupy on the state's segregated trains, was actually a test case engineered by the city's community of mixed-racial-heritage people, who saw their prestige and power slipping away as the nation moved toward a less nuanced conception of race. In lucid prose, Luxenberg lays out the history of racialized segregation in the North and South of the United States and offers vivid portraits of main actors in this civil rights struggle, from ex-slave abolitionist Frederick Douglass to judge John Marshall Harlan (raised in Kentucky, but a staunch supporter of the Union during the Civil War) and lawyer Albion Tourgee, whose Civil War military service awakened him to the "full awfulness" of slavery. Some readers may find this exhaustively researched account excessively wordy and too detailed, but Luxenberg provides a useful take on one of the Supreme Court's most influential decisions. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A triple biography illuminates the birth of the Jim Crow era.On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only railway car in New Orleans. Plessy could and often did pass for white; his arrest had been arranged to create a perfect Supreme Court test case of Louisiana's segregationist Separate Car Act. The result was catastrophe. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held in sweeping terms that "separate but equal" services were acceptable under the federal Constitution, cementing segregation in public and private facilities across the South for another 60 years. The appeal was directed by Albion Tourge, a famous New York lawyer and civil rights crusader. The court's opinion was written by Henry Billings Brown of Michigan; the sole dissenter was John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky. Longtime Washington Post senior editor Luxenberg (Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret, 2009) investigates the multiplicity of American racial attitudes in the latter half of the 19th century through biographies of these three men, and he carries it off in style. Throughout this period, Americans in all regions grappled with questions involving relations between the races, including distinctions between social and political equality and the difficulties of determining a person's race. The author's subjects well encapsulate his theme. Tourge was a northern firebrand who lived for years in Reconstruction-era North Carolina, facing down the Ku Klux Klan. Harlan's views evolved from his slave-state origins to a vision of limited racial equality. Brown remained subject to the pervasive casual racism that informed the nation's progress from slavery to apartheid in the service of the comfort of the white majority. Luxenberg brilliantly tackles a difficult task, presenting his solidly researched work clearly and with a restrained objectivity. The racial conflicts and conundrums emerge organically from the colorful stories of each of the principals, with the tragic ending always in view.An engaging and sensitive exploration of America's detour from the promise of equal protection. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE SPRING OF 1890, Albion Tourgée, who had fought for the Union in the United States Army and then against the Ku Klux Klan as a Reconstruction judge, received an invitation to address a conference in upstate New York on the "Negro Question" hosted by the Quaker philanthropist Albert Smiley. Tourgée was an ideal choice: He had remained engaged in the struggle for equality long after many white people had lost interest. But as Steve Luxenberg shows in "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Feruguson, and America's Journey From Slavery to Segregation," Tourgée was tempted to stay home. Longtime allies were boycotting the conference, with the encouragement of black newspaper editors and activists. Their complaint was simple: Not a single "Negro" had been invited. Yet in response to the protest, organizers doubled down. "A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case," Lyman Abbott wrote in The Christian Union. Tourgée attended and lectured a roomful of liberal reformers, educators and clergymen for over an hour. He celebrated the progress freedmen had made since emancipation, wondered if the churches had forgotten who Christ was and what he stood for, and criticized the presumption of the guest list: "We have sought testimony about the Negro from his avowed friends and confessed enemies, and think we shall obtain the truth by 'splitting the difference' between them. The testimony of the Negro in regard to his past and present conditions and aspirations for the future is worth more than that of all the white observers that can be packed upon the planet." This incident, which comes toward the end of Luxenberg's absorbing book, is a valuable reminder of something easy to forget. Not that the North also had a race problem; no sentient American should be able to forget that. Rather, that in the century after Reconstruction, segregation was not the worst possible outcome for black people. There was also exclusion (not separate schools but no schools) and elimination. Thousands of African-Americans were murdered by lynching alone. There is no escaping exclusion and elimination in a book about race in the United States, but Luxenberg's focus is on the battle against segregation. He begins in Massachusetts in the 1840 s with an abolitionistled victory over Jim Crow cars on the railroads and ends 50 years later with two crushing defeats. In what came to be known as the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had guaranteed equal access to public conveyances, accommodations, recreation and juries. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court upheld a Louisiana law mandating separate railroad cars, thereby upholding the constitutionality of segregation. Luxenberg, a senior editor at The Washington Post and the author of "Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret," braids brief narratives of legal battles together with intimate, cradle-tograve portraits of three key figures in Plessy: John Marshall Harlan, Henry Billings Brown and Tourgée. Harlan was a slaveholding Kentucky lawyer and politician. In his first run for Congress he accused his Democratic opponent of being soft on the expansion of slavery in the territories. Harlan ultimately opposed secession and fought against the Confederacy, but he also opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln's reelection bid, and the 13th and 14th Amendments. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by Rutherford B. Hayes, who was eager to appoint a Southerner but feared that he could not get a nominee from farther south than Kentucky confirmed. Brown was born in Massachusetts and attended both Yale and Harvard law schools (though he failed to obtain a degree from either). He practiced law in Michigan, specializing in Great Lakes shipping. Before a short stint as a district court judge in Memphis, he had barely touched Southern soil. Although Brown was no radical, while campaigning for General Grant he called the Democrats the party of slavery and the Klan. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Benjamin Harrison in 1890, the same year that the Louisiana Legislature enacted a Separate Car Act, "to promote the comfort of passengers on railway trains." Tourgée was an Ohioan who, as late as 1860, had teased his fiancee for her antislavery views. He was radicalized by the war and even more by his experience after it as a judge in North Carolina. Tourgée was not uncritical of Reconstruction - he called his best-selling novel based on his time in the South "A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools." But he agreed with his black friends that Reconstruction's failures followed not from Northern overreach but from timidity. Tourgée took the case challenging Louisiana's law on behalf of the Comité des Citoyens - black, white and Creole - led by the New Orleans newspaper editor Louis Martinet. Tourgée's client, Homer Plessy, was a shoemaker with skin as light as Robert E. Lee's. Tourgée argued in his brief to the Supreme Court that even if there were a clear and simple way to distinguish black from white, which there wasn't, the law violated both the 13th and 14th Amendments, intended by Congress to make the Constitution "colorblind." Luxenberg's history contains so many surprises, absurdities and ironies that it would be a shame to spoil the final chapters by revealing which justice ended up on which side. One, writing for the majority, mocked the idea that the law was a violation of the 13 th Amendment and insisted that the 14th Amendment, whatever its legal objectives with respect to equality, could, "in the nature of things," hardly have been intended "to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." The other justice, alone in his dissent, conceded that the white race was dominant and likely to remain so. But, he argued, when it comes to the law, there is "no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." He predicted, correctly, that segregation laws would increase race hatred and that the decision would in time prove to be as pernicious as Dred Scott. Along with the court cases and the three lovingly researched lives, Luxenberg devotes many lively and illuminating pages to race and politics in New Orleans. That's a lot for one book. Still, the subtitle of "Separate" is misleading. Only the last section is about Plessy, and the book is not the story of "America's journey from slavery to segregation." In fact, there was no such journey. There was slavery and segregation in antebellum Southern cities, just as there was segregation in the antebellum North. After emancipation, there was freedom and segregation (and exclusion and elimination). The subtitle is also misleading because separate and unequal extended far beyond transportation and accommodations to education, employment, health care, credit, housing and criminal justice. Understanding the rash of late-19th-century segregation laws, like the rash of disfranchisement laws, means asking questions about who wanted them and why. For answers, historians have looked at the efforts (often those of liberals and progressives) to contain the explosive mixture of race, gender and political conflict in growing Southern cities; the emergence of the black middle class and the entry of black women into politics; the Woman Suffrage Movement; the Populist Movement; the determination of black people to hold on to the rights and power they gained during Reconstruction; and the determination of white people to take those rights and that power away. Segregation is not one story but many. Luxenberg has written his with energy, elegance and a heart aching for a world without it. JAMES Goodman, distinguished, professor of history and creative writing at Rutgers University, Newark, is the author of "Stories of Scottsboro," "Blackout" and "But Where Is the Lamb?"
Choice Review
The Plessy v. Ferguson case is well known: it found that separate can be equal. Luxenberg (long-time senior editor at the Washington Post) tells the important and neglected story of the ruling, a story that reveals how the US turned away from the promises of Reconstruction and moved toward a legal structure that enshrined separate and unequal. Integrating biographies of some of the principals in Plessy--Albion Tourgée, novelist, lawyer, advocate; Justice Henry Brown, author of the majority Supreme Court opinion; and Justice John Marshall Harlan, author of the dissent--Luxenberg offers fascinating insights into the political, social, and legal journeys of each of these men and others involved in the case. He weaves in a well-researched discussion of the road from the 13th and 14th Amendments through the civil rights cases of the 1870s and 1880s to Plessy in 1896. The author underscores the fact that issues of civil rights were not those of a single geographic region but rather national in scope. Understanding the legal consequences of enshrining Jim Crow laws in the early 20th century is fundamental to understanding the history of civil rights in the US. This book is a most welcome contribution to that effort. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Thomas F. Armstrong, formerly, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, UAE
Library Journal Review
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) established the notion of "separate but equal" as law, until that decision was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education. Luxenberg (senior editor, Washington Post; Annie's Ghost) presents a masterly narrative of the case and its roots, dating back to 1838, relating a complex story told through the lives of Supreme Court Justices John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) and Henry Billings Brown (1836-1913); Albion Tourgee (1838-1905), author, lawyer, and civil rights firebrand; and the 11,000 free people of color of New Orleans. The author adroitly incorporates accounts of these three men, their wives, and many lesser-known residents with the unfolding racial turmoil brought about by the Civil War and Reconstruction. This engrossing work builds to the courtroom drama in which Tourgee argues passionately but unsuccessfully on behalf of Homer Plessy to a Supreme Court, including, Brown, who wrote the majority opinion, and Harlan, the onetime slave owner, whose only dissenting vote revealed separate but equal hypocrisy. VERDICT In the sweeping style of Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, this work will be enthusiastically received by informed readers and historians and is likely to become the seminal work on this crucial Supreme Court decision.-Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Author's Note | p. xi |
| Prologue April 1896 | p. xiii |
| Cast Of Characters | p. xxi |
| Part I Ambition | |
| Chapter 1 Taking Their Seats • Massachusetts, 1838-1843 | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 Harlan of Kentucky • 1853-1857 | p. 25 |
| Chapter 3 Brown of New England • 2856-1857 | p. 47 |
| Chapter 4 Tourgee of Ohio • 1858-1860 | p. 69 |
| Chapter 5 The Free People of Color • New Orleans, 1860 | p. 91 |
| Part II War | |
| Chapter 6 "The Harlan Name" • Kentucky, 1858-1862 | p. 107 |
| Chapter 7 "A War of Which No Man Can See the End" • Brown in Detroit, 1860-1864 | p. 131 |
| Chapter 8 "For This I Am Willing to Die" • Tourgee on the March, 1861-1863 | p. 153 |
| Chapter 9 "Claim Your Rights" • New Orleans and Washington, 1863-1864 | p. 175 |
| Part III Ascent | |
| Chapter 10 Choosing Sides • Harlan in Kentucky, 1865-1871 | p. 193 |
| Chapter 11 "A Taste for Judicial Life" • Brown in Detroit, 1866-1872 | p. 215 |
| Chapter 12 Tourgee Goes South • North Carolina, 1865-1870 | p. 237 |
| Chapter 13 Equal but Separate • New Orleans and the North, 1867-1871 | p. 261 |
| Part IV Precipice | |
| Chapter 14 "Is Not Harlan the Man?" • Kentucky and Washington, 1875-1878 | p. 281 |
| Chapter 15 "Uncongenial Strifes" • Brown and Tourgee, 1875-1879 | p. 305 |
| Chapter 16 Fool's Errand • North and South, 1880-1883 | p. 329 |
| Chapter 17 The Color Line Sharpens • 1883-1888 | p. 351 |
| Chapter 18 "The Negro Question" • Mayville, Washington, and New Orleans, 1889-1890 | p. 373 |
| Part V Resistance | |
| Chapter 19 "In Behalf of 7,999,999 of My Race" • New Orleans, Mayville, Detroit, and Washington, 1890-1891 | p. 397 |
| Chapter 20 Arrest • Mayville and New Orleans, 1892-1893 | p. 419 |
| Chapter 21 "You Are Fighting a Great Battle" • Washington, Mayville, and New Orleans, 1893-1895 | p. 443 |
| Chapter 22 "In the Nature of Things" • March, April, May 1896 | p. 465 |
| Epilogue | p. 489 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 507 |
| Notes | p. 513 |
| Sources | p. 571 |
| Index | p. 581 |