Separate

Separate by Steve Luxenberg

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RZ7WMX44WAABB?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

This is a wonderful book to bookend with Dred Scott: The Inside Story by David Hardy. both books involve legal decisions affecting race relations in America. Both books leave the reader in amazement about how such learned men of the Supreme Court could be so stupid and dense.

Author Steve Luxenberg approaches the Plessy v. Fergusson legal decision through the biographies of various individuals, particularly Supreme Court Justices John Marshall Harlan and Henry Brown and Albion Tourge, the lawyer and civil rights advocate who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Homer Plessy. Luxenberg starts with the early lives of these individuals in the 1850s and follows their lives through the Civil War and into the Guilded Age.

This approach is absolutely fascinating and educational. The reader gets a spectrum of views on American culture during its time of transformation. John Marshall Harlan was the child of an influential, slave-holding Kentucky family who grew up to fight as an officer for the Union and eventually became the only Supreme Court justice to hold that the “Constitution knows no race.” Albion Tourgee was a Yankee who joined the Union army as a private soldier in order to free the slaves, moved to the South as a carpet bagger, became an attorney and a successful author and eventually master-minded the losing case for Homer Plessy. Henry Brown was another Yankee lawyer who moved to Michigan and eventually made his way to the Supreme Court to become the author of the infamous Plessy v. Fergusson decision which absurdly rejected the argument that making former slaves segregate from their former masters was inconceivable as a badge or indicia of slavery.

Luxenberg also brings a number of other characters. There is the entire les gens de couleur libres - the free men of color - the entire community of blacks and mulattos in New Orleans, who had never been slave, had fought with Andy Jackson in defense of America and had been cruelly denied their promised equal rights. This community felt deeply the sting of Jim Crow legislation and conspired with the railroads to bring a test case. For the test case, they provided Homer Plessy, who could pass as white, to be arrested for refusing to leave the white coach. It may come as a surprise for some to find that the railroads opposed the Jim Crow laws because of the expense of running the extra cars for a few customers.

Frederick Douglas is also an important part of this book. I was impressed by this person, who I had never really knew, that I picked up the new Frederick Douglas biography.

Luxenberg writes very well. He seems very sympathetic to his subjects, even Justice Brown, who, at times comes across as shallow social climber. At times, Luxenberg can tug on the heart strings as his subjects leave their lives, which leaves none unscarred by tragedy.

I was surprised to find that Plessy was not considered an important case until the legacy of Jim Crow was dismantled in the 1950s. Perhaps the most important legacy of Plessy v. Fergusson was simply the dissent of John Marshall Harlan, which put a marker down on the promise that America should not be a racial state.