THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 2

Separate but Equal?

Separate but Equal?

By Joshua Doggrell on Apr 13, 2021

A Review of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation (W.W. Norton, 2019) by Steve Luxenberg

In 21st-Century America, there are precious few mediums through which the issue of race can be addressed with even a modicum of rationality.  One of the few means still available is the thorough, well-researched work produced by historians. Perhaps the only reason this avenue is still available to us at all is because those whom you would expect to participate in protests over its content do not usually spend the required time for reading books or truly studying history.

Steve Luxenberg, associate editor of The Washington Post, is on the left end of the political spectrum, but his treatment of the indelible Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson deserves credit for valuing the truth in a time when doing so concerning race can initiate such remonstrance from the usual suspects.

After twelve years of Reconstruction and the Compromise of 1877, which maintained the Republican hold on the White House by placing Rutherford B. Hayes in the chief executive chair, federal troops were finally withdrawn from the South and Southerners began taking back control of their State legislatures. If we are to believe the elementary-school version of the period, this is when those evil, white Southerners began reasserting themselves by putting the black race back in its place, thereby rejecting all the enlightened policies produced by the righteous Yankee, who had emancipated the black man, granted him equal rights, and embraced him as a fellow citizen.  That is not the truth and Luxenberg, again, to his credit, does not shy away from it.

Comically, however, before diving in Luxenberg felt it necessary to include an "Author's Note" before the Prologue. This obligatory disclaimer forms a politically-correct conjunction with an MLK quote preceding the first chapter (MLK is found nowhere else in the book) that serves as somewhat of an apology from the author to any reader whose tender sensibilities might be aggrieved by monstrosities like "labels such as 'colored' and 'mulatto.'" Mind you, these "labels" were used indiscriminately for centuries by advocates and blacks themselves through at least the 1960s.  Alas, when a white male (even a writer from The Washington Post) actually puts such dastardly things in print today in a book that has a chapter entitled "'The Negro Question'" (smelling salts please!), he probably thinks it best to cover all the (white) bases.

Plessy dealt with a law passed by the State of Louisiana in 1890 called the Separate Car Act, which enforced separation of races on different railroad cars. Opponents of the law orchestrated a prearranged arrest where Homer Plessy (who could pass for white and was only 1/8 black) was taken into custody for refusing to move from the white car to the "Jim Crow" car.

Ah, Jim Crow.   Wikipedia informs us these were laws that "mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America..." Britannica.com says they were laws that "enforced racial segregation in the American South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s."

The problem with these definitions is that they are utterly false. Jim Crow laws predated the Confederacy and have their origins in...the North. Luxenberg relates this in the first pages of the first chapter, where he writes "[s]eparation had no role in the South before the Civil War... It was the free and conflicted North that gave birth to separation... One of those birthplaces was the Massachusetts town of Salem." He goes on to recount in detail how, even though blacks comprised but one percent of Massachusetts's population, "Jim Crow" became a "commonly understood phrase in New England's lexicon" by the late 1830s. On September 8, 1841, Frederick Douglass himself experienced a healthy dose of Yankee tolerance when he was forcibly ejected off a white car on the way from Salem to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.