Plessy v. Ferguson – 100 Years Later
1996; Washington and Lee University School of Law; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1942-6658
Autores Tópico(s)Legal Education and Practice Innovations
ResumoHonorable John Minor Wisdom* am deeply honored to speak to the graduating class of the College of Law at Washington and Lee University. The Lee Chapel, the Lee House, the line of beautiful colonnaded buildings, the lovely campus, the Pines, where my two brothers and lived when we were students here, the Lewis Building, the Powell Building, and the many great changes that have taken place since came here as a freshman in September 1921- have all stirred my heart. This attractive group of graduates has helped increase the quality of life at the law school and improved the school's standing in the legal community. It has earned you an escape from the generalizations for success in life and in law which are so often tediously expressed at law graduation exercises. We are lawyers. We shall talk law. We shall talk about Plessy v. Ferguson' in which the United States Supreme Court gave its blessing to the but doctrine 100 years ago, May 18, 1896. That doctrine served as a thin disguise for Jim Crowism until Brown v. Board of Education' on May 17, 1954, demolished it, although Brown does not specifically overrule Plessy.3 Indeed, but seems to comply with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; separate but unequal seems to equate with discrimination. We shall talk about John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy. We shall talk about Albion Winegar Tourgee, the brilliant but erratic lawyer, crusading carpetbagger, and reconstruction novelist who brain-trusted the losing anti-Jim Crowism committee of black plaintiffs.4 It who supplied the dissenting justice in Plessy, John Marshall Harlan, with the most powerful maxim in American law: Our Constitution is color-blind. 5 Plessy v. Ferguson has always fascinated me. gave a talk on it in one of the Dreyfous Lecture Series at Tulane in 1972. called it Plessy Rides Again. never published it because not satisfied with my footnotes. That before Lofgren's fine work on Plessy6 and Owen Fiss's brilliant and balanced analysis of the case in the recently published Volume VIII of the Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court.7 Two years after my talk, my wife gave a lecture on Albion W. Tourgie to her literary club, the Quarante Club, a women's club well older than a hundred years. She called her talk The Crusading Carpetbagger! Bonnie tracked down the source of Harlan's powerful maxim by reading Tourgee's novels. John Harlan's full statement reads: Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. 9 This quote is a paraphrase of Tourgee's metaphor in his briefs in Plessy: Justice is pictured blind and her daughter, the Law, ought at least to be color-blind. Bonnie commented in her paper: I am probably unique in that have carefully read seven of Tourgee's novels all the way through, and discovered that Tourgee, like Mozart, simply repeating himself.10 These famous words first issued from the mouth of Hesden Le Moyne, the hero of Tourgtees Bricks Without Straw. Professor Fiss generously repeated this comment in a footnote.ll Certainly at some point should refer to the fact that Edmund Wilson, probably the leading American writing critic of the midtwentieth century, wrote that Tourgee's A Fool's Errand2 was received as a sensation in its day and it ought to be an historical classic in ours.13 Again, Tourgee a special case. He a Northerner who resembled the Southerners: in his insolence, his independence, his readiness to accept a challenge, his recklessness and ineptitude in practical matters, his romantic and chivalrous view of the world in which he living.'4 Albion Winegar of French Huguenot stock on his father's side and of sturdy Swiss stock on his mother's side. His parents moved from the Hudson Valley to the little town of Lee, Massachusetts, and then to Williamstown, Ohio where Albion born in 1838. …
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