ssfully argued the Civil Rights Cases, a U.S. Supreme Court decision that had severely curtailed the power of Congress to protect the rights of blacks in the South.The court rejected Tourgee’s arguments by a vote of 7 to 1. Speaking for the court, Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown declared that the 14th Amendment was adopted “to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law,” but he argued the amendment “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races.” Ignoring the reality of segregation in the South, Justice Brown denied Tourgee’s argument that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” Brown asserted that segregation was not discriminatory because whites were also segregated from blacks. Thus, if segregation made blacks feel inferior, “it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Brown stated: Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races were equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race were inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.The decision in the Plessy case granted constitutional support to the “separate but equal” doctrine. As long as segregated facilities were equal they were permissible. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a bitter dissent to the court’s opinion. A former slaveholder, Harlan acknowledged that the white race was “the dominant...
