The Fifties

by David Halberstam

It was a remarkably insensitive decision, reversing the tide of legal equality begun after the Civil War. “Justice Brown, in short would make no provision for the fact or purpose or result of the Civil War,” wrote Richard Kluger, a historian of the segregation decisions. “He [Justice Brown] wrote as if the South had won.” The vote against Plessy was seven to one, the one dissenting cast by John Marshall Harlan, the leading intellect of the Court and himself a very conservative man. In a passionate dissent, he noted that if the state could do this to blacks on railroad cars, could it not do it elsewhere to other groups, “of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?” He added: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power.... But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”