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Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. This month marks the 130th anniversary of one of the most infamous cases in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Plessy v. Ferguson challenged a notorious Jim Crow law, one of many that at the time had replaced slavery with segregation in the South. This now nearly universally discredited decision from the Supreme Court is worthy of our reflection, especially in light of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Homer Plessy was a black man arrested for buying a ticket for a so called white train car. He was arraigned before Judge John Ferguson for defying a Louisiana law that required railroads to provide what were called equal but separate cars for people of different races. Plessy argued that the Louisiana law imposed a badge of servitude on him and denied him equal protection under the laws and and the exercise of his privileges and immunities as a U.S. citizen. The state of Louisiana argued that it was reasonable exercise of the state's police powers.
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The case worked its way to the
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US Supreme Court, where in a 7:1 decision, the court upheld Louisiana's law as constitutional. The Court allowed the state to rely on, and I quote, the established usages, customs and traditions of the people. The decision dealt a crucial blow to efforts for racial equality validating the separate but equal doctrine as constitutional for several more decades. The lone dissent in the decision came from Justice John Marshall Harlan, an elder who taught in a Presbyterian church until his death, including during his years while on the Supreme Court. He was sincere in his Christian faith, even earning a chapter in Cambridge University Press's volume, Great Christian Jurist in American History.
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Though he was an early supporter of
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slavery and an opponent of Abraham Lincoln,
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Harlan came to see the end of the Civil War and the subsequent amendments to the Constitution as part of God's divine plan to free the nation from the evil of slavery.
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He referred to the Declaration as our
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political Bible, with its proclamation of equality as proof of America's moral legitimacy.
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In Plessy, he provided what's perhaps the
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most famous dissenting opinion in Supreme Court history, saying our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In 1954, in Brown v. Education, the Court finally overturned the Plessy decision, but in a somewhat ironic way. That decision was based on questionable psychological research which showed that segregation in that case, school segregation, created a feeling of inferiority among black children. In other words, the Court did not argue that segregation was objectively wrong, but only that it was harmful. Though the outcome is certainly to be celebrated, it is striking, as political scientist Dr. Ed Ehler noted, that Harlan's dissent in Plessy was ignored by the Supreme Court and Brown v. Board of Education. The exact reason why is unclear, but Ehler suspected that it was to make possible future racial distinctions for more benign purposes like affirmative action and racial quotas possible. Regardless, the Brown v. Board of Education decision was the first time that the high court sidestepped the Constitution and relied on social science research to justify a decision. And as such, it's an example of science replacing what are called self evident truths in the Declaration in the Constitution, in this case, equality. Had the Court relied on Harlan's dissent, it would have aligned with the 14Amendment's guarantee of equal protection and in a much larger respect, with the principle of equality that's found in the Declaration of Independence. As we consider here the legacy of Plessy for today, it's fitting to consider one of the greatest contemporary speeches given by a sitting Supreme Court Justice. Just recently, Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at the University of Texas to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In that speech he said equality is from God and that the Declaration is in fact, along with the Gospels, one of the greatest anti slavery documents in the history of Western civilization. He then spoke of Plessy v. Ferguson, calling racial segregation and I quote, grossly incompatible with our colorblind Constitution and how Justice Harlan's dissent demonstrated what he called the right thing to do. Thomas is right. Whenever the permanently true principles of the Declaration are rejected, there are consequences. Ideas like historicism or neo Darwinian science could never replace what is true as a foundation for a good and just society. Thus, said Thomas, we have to demonstrate courageous devotion to the enduring principles of the Declaration if the laws of nature and nature's God are to continue to guide us and if we are to make it for yet another 250 years. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co authored by Andrew Carico. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast and for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org.