The Journey to Separate but Equal

Both scholarly and popular commentators have tended to overlook the 1878 U.S. Supreme Court case Hall v. DeCuir. Unlike the Court’s other postbellum cases, United States v. Cruikshank, the Civil Rights Cases, and, ultimately, Plessy v. Ferguson, that played a major role in thwarting the egalitarian revolution promised by the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction-era Civil Rights legislation, DeCuir has existed in relative obscurity. Beermann goes a long way toward ending this neglect by bringing forth an enticing blend of legal and social history in The Journey to Separate but Equal.DeCuir’s case signaled the not merely conservative but frankly pro-segregationist direction that the Court was ultimately to take in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The case involved the Court’s invalidation of an 1869 Louisiana statute prohibiting racial discrimination in public transportation, at least as it applied to steamships traveling interstate. Beermann provides a history of the case, starting with a reminder concerning the social history of race in Louisiana. As is known to students of the state’s racial history, the prevailing tendency in much of the United States to divide, by law and custom, the population into simple Black and White categories was further complicated by the existence of a third group, les gens de couleur libre (mixed-race, French speaking free people of color). This group played a major role in the struggle to resist Louisiana’s developing Jim Crow regime after the Civil War—particularly its determination to assign these free people to the Colored category along with previously enslaved Negroes—as enshrined in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson.Plaintiff Josephine DeCuir came from this previously privileged community. From a wealthy antebellum family, she, like other southern slaveholders, had suffered the significant financial reverses that accompanied African-American emancipation. She also found herself facing increased racial restrictions, the loss of the special status separate from Blacks that her community had enjoyed before the War of the Rebellion. Her lawsuit, a struggle against these new restrictions, was provoked by a steamship company not allowing her to travel in a first-class cabin, even though she had paid the first-class fare. She sued under an 1869 Louisiana statute prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations.Beermann’s skillful discussion of the DeCuir litigation provides important insights into the lawyers and jurists who played critical roles in the case. DeCuir’s victories at the trial-court and Louisiana’s Supreme Court set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court case, which fell into the hands of conservative Chief Justice Morrison Waite. Waite, no fan of civil rights or an expansive reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, treated the case as an occasion to craft an opinion that Beermann sees as an early use of the dormant commerce-clause doctrine—that state law may interfere with interstate commerce and thus violate Congress’s power to regulate commerce, even in the absence of a Congressional statute. Waite’s majority opinion held that by requiring integrated facilities on a steamship traveling in interstate waters, the state of Louisiana was interfering with commerce from nearby states that required segregated facilities.Beermann rightly sees DeCuir as the beginning, or near beginning, of a strain of Supreme Court jurisprudence that not only sanctioned but indeed applauded the doctrine of separate but equal. Hall v. DeCuir was a critical building block in the development of that tragic part of the history of American law. Beermann does an able job of telling that story

Economic Justice · Legislation · Political science · Population · Separate but equal · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Statute · Supreme court · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society