Plessy v. Ferguson by Brook Thomas - First Edition, 1997 from Macmillan Student Store

Plessy v. Ferguson

A Brief History with DocumentsFirst Edition ©1997 Brook Thomas

In 1896, The Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision made legal a system of "separate but equal" racial segregation not overruled until 1954. Using the full text of the Court's opinion, along with a selection of responses to the ruling, Brook Thomas allows students to re-create a con...
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Plessy v. Ferguson by Brook Thomas - First Edition, 1997 from Macmillan Student Store

In 1896, The Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision made legal a system of "separate but equal" racial segregation not overruled until 1954. Using the full text of the Court's opinion, along with a selection of responses to the ruling, Brook Thomas allows students to re-create a context of the complicated debates and conditions in which the decision took place.

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Table of Contents

  Foreword
  Preface
    
PART I. INTRODUCTION: THE LEGAL BACKGROUND
    
    The Civil War Amendments
    The Slaughter-House Cases and Their Implications
    The Civil Rights Cases and Their Consequences
    Plessy's Argument before the Court
    The Majority Decision
    Harlan's Dissent
    
PART II. THE DOCUMENTS
    
  1. Plessy v. Ferguson, May 18, 1896
    
  2. Selected Views on the "Race Question" at the Time of Plessy
       John Tyler Morgan, The Race Question in the United States, September 1890
       Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Amalgamation, August 1896
       Henry M. Field, Capacity of the Negro--His Position in the North. The Color Line in New England, 1890
       Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895
       Central Law Review, January 17, 1896
    
  3. Responses to Plessy
    The Press
       Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Equality, but Not Socialism, May 19, 1896
       Tribune (New York), The Unfortunate Law of the Land May 19, 1896
       Union Advertiser (Rochester, New York), State Sovereignty, May 19, 1896
       Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), A Strange Decision, May 20, 1896
       Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), May 20, 1896
       Evening Journal (New York), May 20, 1896
       Journal (Providence, Rhode Island), May 20, 1896
       Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia), Separate Coaches, May 21, 1896
       Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), May 30, 1896
       A.M.E. Church Review (Philadelphia), June 1896
       Booker T. Washington, Who Is Permanently Hurt? June 1896
    Legal Periodicals
       Central Law Journal, August 14, 1896
       Michigan Law Journal, 1896
       American Law Review, 1896
       Virginia Law Register, 1896
    African American Intellectuals
       W. E. B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro People, 1897
       Charles W. Chesnutt, The Courts and the Negro, ca. 1911
    Sixteen Years after the Decision
       Charles Wallace Collins, From The Fourteenth Amendment and the States, 1912
       Henry Billings Brown, Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Harlan,1912
    
PART III. CONCLUSION: IN THE WAKE OF PLESSY
    
APPENDICES
    
    Members of the Court
    Chronology of Events Related to Plessy (1849–1925)
    Questions for Consideration
    Selected Bibliography
    
  Index

Brook Thomas

Brook Thomas is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. After a book on James Joyce's Ulysses (1982), he turned his attention to the intersections of law, literature, and cultural history in the United States. He is author of Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987); The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991); American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997); and Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007). He has lectured on Plessy v. Ferguson to more than five thousand undergraduates over the course of several years.