Lawyers may bemoan this fact but most people don’t go to court just for the fun of it. If the court has already advised the public on what result it will give, people don’t bother going through the formality of taking the issue to court.
That’s what the Plessy decision did in 1896; it advised the public that the courts would uphold racial segregation. It did so in broad enough terms that nobody felt the need to challenge it on specific issues. It was clear that a decision that said segregation was okay on trains was also going to cover segregation on buses and streetcars and in other areas. Nobody felt the need to spend thousands of dollars on an unnecessary lawsuit.
So precedents do affect other issues because they tell people what kind of cases cannot be won and aren’t worth starting.
As I already explained, people did spend thousands of dollars on “unnecessary lawsuits” about whether Plessy’s holding applied to public education. There were an untold number of cases that I didn’t mention about whether it applied to other public accommodations like hotels, restaurants, and so forth.
Courts may announce a broad rule that clearly applies beyond the scope of the case that is before them. For example, the Obergefell Court held that “The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.” Judge Roy Moore is now in trouble again because he directed Alabama officials to act as though Obergefell did not effectively strike down Alabama’s marriage law.
But usually, courts rule narrowly. The Plessy Court did.
That is wrong. Firstly, in Plessy itself, the main judgment gives examples of cases where discrimination, sometimes more egregious sometimes implied, not expressed, based on race was not permitted by the Courts, and they specifically distinguish the case to the facts at hand ie segregated railway cars. Secondly, cases on Civil Rights, racial discrimination continued to come before the Court in the years before Brown and sometimes they were successful.
Considering how limited Plessy was, why did it become synonymous with a reading of racial discrimination is constitutional? Since the text says quite the opposite.
(You would know this obviously). Most times precedents are not expressly overruled. But you start getting a line of authorities which seem to go in a different direction and after a while you might well question (or in Plessy’s case; outright declare) whether its still good law.
Because it was the first case with nationwide impact that actually adopted such a holding, and because in most of the nation segregation was the default position already.
It wasn’t as though a bunch of state and local governments went, “oh, goody, SCOTUS has given us permission!” when the opinion was released. They were already enthusiastically segregating public facilities (or turning a blind eye to private segregation).
The Civil Rights Cases had already established that the federal government didn’t have the power to prevent such state and local action, and that was really the trigger.
You are not properly stating the relevant “holding” of Plessy v. Ferguson. The relevant holding was that state laws requiring/providing “separate but equal” facilities for blacks as for whites were valid state actions under the Fourteenth Amendment (presumably referencing for the most part the equal protection clause).
It is this specific holding that Brown v. Board of Education rejected.
Now, as to how Plessy’s court got there, that’s a horse of a different color.
After the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1668, the first case testing racially discriminatory state laws was Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 US 303 (1879). Notice this is 11 years (!) later. In that case, the Court rejected a West Virginia law excluding blacks from juries. In making that determination, the Court found that the 14th Amendment gave blacks the right to be exempt from legal discriminations “implying inferiority in civil society”. Note that the Court specifically stated that, had the black plaintiff in the case complained because there were no blacks ON the jury, that would not have been a violation. It was the categorical exclusion of blacks from juries that was unconstitutional.
Three years later, the Court upheld statutes that punished people more severely for fornicating with members of another race. In Pace v. Alabama, 106 US 583 (1882), the Court upheld Alabama’s statute that imprisoned people who fornicated with someone of the different race (those who fornicated with someone of the same race were merely fined). The reasoning here was that the statute applied identically to blacks and to whites; both were punished equally severely. This case, btw, was the basis for finding anti-miscegenation statutes constitutional, even though that specific concept was not before the Court.
The next year, the Court struck down attempts by Congress to legislate civil rights to blacks in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 US 3 (1883). The rationale here was that the statutes attempted to make illegal acts of private persons, and the Court noted that the 14th Amendment did not apply to the acts of private persons.
Three years after that, in the aforementioned Yick Wo v Hopkins case (118 US 356 (1886)), the Court struck down a San Francisco ordinance which precluded anyone from running a laundry in a wooden building without permission of the Board of Supervisors. Not shockingly, all applications to do so from Chinese persons were rejected, all applications from white persons were allowed. The enforcement was clearly discriminatory against the Chinese, and no valid reason could be offered. So it was unconstitutional.
So at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, the following appeared to be true: the 14th Amendment barred direct discrimination against blacks or Chinese, but did not bar laws as long as the law itself did not treat people of different race differently as to application. In Plessy, of course, train companies were required by Louisiana to have “equal but separate accommodations” for black and white passengers. The question before the court, then, was did this involve direct discrimination against blacks, or did it treat blacks and whites equally?
Cue a pre-Civil War case from Massachusetts, Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. (5 Cush.) 198 (1850). In that case, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had held that a black student could be required to attend a school established for blacks, even though it was not the closest school to her, as long as it was in all other respects “equal”. This case, and its rationale, became the underpinnings for the entire “separate but equal” set of Jim Crow laws.
So what did Plessy really say?
States can require/provide separate but equal facilities as a reasonable use of their police power, without violating the Amendment as San Francisco and West Virginia had (separate but equal is not inherently discriminatory).
States can do this so long as the law is a reasonable exercise of that police power, deference being given to the legislature in deciding if the exercise is a good faith effort to promote public good, rather than an attempt to oppress a specific race.
The law in question was reasonable, because it did not itself mark the black race with a badge of inferiority.
Did Brown I overrule Plessy? Not expressly, no.
Interestingly, the Court in Brown did not even bother to apply the concept of “strict scrutiny” to the situation, despite that concept having already been established with regard to racial discrimination in the Korematsu case.
In summary: Plessy stood for the proposition that “separate but equal” facilities were allowed under the 14th Amendment (segregation). Brown expressly held that this was not true as regards to education.
