The Slaughter House Cases--The Butcher’s Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Co., 83 U.S. 36 [Segregation]
1873, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Samuel F. Miller
Attorney for the Plaintiff: M. H. Carpenter, J. S. Black
Attorney for the Defendant: T. J. Durant
This case provided the Court with the first opportunity to interpret the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Butchers in New Orleans contested Louisiana’s 1869 law requiring them to conduct all their slaughtering on the premises of one specific company. The plaintiffs argued that this law violated section one of the Fourteenth Amendment. That section stated that no state law could abridge the privileges of citizens of the U.S.; deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process; nor deny to any person equal protection of the laws. They argued that the new amendment forbade state laws that abridged the rights of citizens of the U. S., among which was the right to labor freely in an honest business. The Supreme Court rejected the butchers’ claim in a five to four opinion, and did so in a way that narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection to be only to those cases involving the freedom of black Americans not the protection of the basic rights of whites. The Court distinguished between “state citizenship” and “federal citizenship,” and that state actions could not be struck down. Critics have argued that this decision severely undermined the ability of the government to protect the rights of the freedmen, although the case had nothing to do with black Louisianans as such.

Hall v. DeCuir, 95 U.S. 485 [Segregation]
1878, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Morrison R. Waite
Attorney for the Plaintiff: R.H. Marr
Attorney for the Defendant: E.K. Washington
This case was first appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the master and owner of a steamboat that transported freight and passengers between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. A Louisiana Supreme Court awarded damages to Josephine DeCuir, an African-American woman denied access to a cabin set aside for white passengers during her voyage from New Orleans to Hermitage, Louisiana. The Court held that the Louisiana law on which the damages were based did not apply because the steamboat was a business involved in interstate commerce, which could only be regulated by the U. S. Congress. States could not require carriers engaged in interstate commerce to provide integrated facilities even for trips that took place only within state borders. The Court’s opinion is said to have clearly indicated its interest in preserving existing racial customs and to have provided a rationale that was eventually used to support the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 [Segregation]
1896, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Justice Henry Billings Brown
Attorney for the Plaintiff: S. F. Phillips, A. W. Tourgee
Attorney for the Defendant: Alex. Porter Morse
In 1890 the state of Louisiana passed a law requiring railroads to provide “separate but equal” cars for African Americans. Homer Plessy, a light-skinned, Creole man identified as 1/8 black, tested the constitutionality of this law by buying a first class ticket on a Louisiana rail line and then sitting in the first class or “white” car. Plessy was arrested for violating the law. He immediately challenged the 1890 law in federal court, charging that it violated his Thirteenth Amendment rights and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. Hearing his appeal, the Supreme Court reasoned that while the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, it could not protect African Americans from state laws that treated them unequally. The language of the Court determined that the Louisiana law was constitutional in its establishment of “separate but equal” cars for African Americans. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Justice John Marshall Harlan, a southern Unionist and one-time slave owner, issued the lone dissent, arguing that the law should be “color blind.” “In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case. . . . It seems that we have yet, in some of the States, a dominant race--a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race.”

Harmon v. Tyler, 273 U.S. 668 [Segregation]
1927, New Orleans, Louisiana
Court Opinion Delivered by: Chief Justice William Howard Taft
Attorney for the Plaintiff: Loys Charbonnet, Frank B. Smith
Attorney for the Defendant: Walter Winn Wright, John D. Nix, Jr., Francis P. Burns, J. Zach Spearing
Benjamin Harmon, an African American, sought a building permit for a white residential neighborhood. A New Orleans municipal code forbade the issue of a building permit for a residence to be lived in by blacks in white neighborhoods or to whites for residency in black neighborhoods. When Harmon was denied the permit, he sued the city in federal court. Harmon won a favorable judgment from the Court based upon the 1917 Supreme Court decision, Buchanan v. Warley, where a similar ordinance in Louisville, KY, had been struck down on the basis that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process” provisions. The Court held that such ordinances denied both blacks and whites the right to acquire property. The decision did little to prevent discrimination in housing because state courts upheld restrictive deeds and housing covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks.