Excerpts from “The Courts and the Negro,” a speech by Charles Chesnutt, 1911

Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932) was the best known African American fiction writing or his time.  Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to parents who were free blacks before the Civil War, he lived in North Carolina and witnessed first hand Reconstruction and its end.  He returned to Cleveland in 1884, studied law, passed the bar exam, and began working as a legal stenographer.  He had already begun writing, and in time had three novels published, many short stories, and a biography of Frederick Douglass.  Chesnutt gave this speech after he abandoned his literary career.  In the speech, he draws on his legal background to give a concise history of how Supreme Court rulings have affected African Americans.

[T]o my mind the most important and far reaching decision of the Supreme Court upon the question of civil rights is that in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, a case which came up from Louisiana in 1895. (163 U.S., 537.)  The opinion is a clear and a definite approval of the recognition by State laws, of color distinctions, something which had theretofore been avoided in civil rights cases.  It establishes racial caste in the United States as firmly as though it were established by act of Congress.  To the opinion Mr. Justice Harlan dissented with his usual vigor, and Justice Brewer did not hear the argument or participate in the decision.  The Court cited the passage quoted by me from a former decision:

The Fourteenth Amendment was ordained to secure equal rights to all persons, and extends its protection to races and classes, and prohibits any State legislation which has the effect of denying to any race or class, or to any individual, the equal protection of the laws, and made the rights of the two races exactly the same.

And then the Court stabbed in the back, and to death, this ideal presentment of rights, and threw its bleeding corpse to the Negro,—the comprehensive Negro, black, brown, yellow, and white—the plaintiff in that case, which involved the separate car law in Louisiana, was seven-eighths white and showed no sign of darker blood—as that court’s definition of his civil status:…

When it was suggested in the argument that to sustain such discrimination laws might justify separate cars for people with red hair or aliens, or require people to walk on different sides of the street, or require colored men’s houses to be in separate blocks, the Court in the opinion, said that such regulations must be reasonable.  And the Court held:

In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the usages, customs, and traditions of the people, with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order.

It is obvious where this leaves the Negro, and it is difficult to see where the Fourteenth Amendment has any application.

The opinion in Plessy vs. Ferguson is, in my mind, as epoch-making as the Dred Scott decision.  Unfortunately, it applies to a class of rights which do not make the heart and conscience of the nation the same direct appeal as was made by slavery, and has not been nor is it likely to produce any such revulsion of feeling.

Another extract from the opinion makes one wonder whether the Court was merely playing with the subject:

We consider the underlying failure of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the races stamps the colored race with the badge of inferiority.  If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act itself, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

I presume that hanging might be pleasant if a man could only convince himself that it would not be painful, nor disgraceful, nor terminate his earthly career.  It is perhaps true that some Negroes—I suspect very few people of mixed blood—have seemed to accept this reasoning.  But I have never been able to see how a self-respecting colored man can approve of any discriminating legislation.

To do so is to condone his own degradation, and accept an inferior citizenship.  If discrimination must of necessity be submitted to, it should meet no better reception than silence.  Protest were better still.

I need not suggest the far-reaching effect of this decision.  The colored people of the South have been, it would seem, as completely segregated as the business of daily life will permit.  Perhaps the lowest depths of race hatred have not been sounded, but a more humiliating, insulting, and degrading system is hardly conceivable under even a nominally free government.  Under Plessy v. Ferguson there is no reason why any northern State may not reproduce in its own borders the conditions in Alabama and Georgia.  And it may be that the Negro and his friends will have to exert themselves to save his rights at the North….

Source: Original copies of the speech are at The Charles W. Chesnutt collection at the Fisk University library.  Published in Thomas, Brook. ed. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.

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