Justice Harlan’s Plessy dissent predicted segregation would spread beyond railroads and was vindicated.

Evidence

In Justice Harlan’s view, allowing states to regulate civil rights on the basis of race was “cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war” and would lead to “no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.” Referring back to the Thirteenth Amendment, he concluded that separating citizens on the arbitrary basis of race while they’re on a public highway, for example, was “a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution.” He added, “The thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.” Harlan predicted that the Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson would have a profound effect on the country. It would encourage “separate but equal” to spread to other areas of public life, not just on railroads. He wasn’t wrong. Racial segregation remained the law of the land well into the 1960s. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Harlan’s dissent framing of segregation as a ‘badge of servitude’ grounded in the Thirteenth Amendment is a key historical anchor for reparations arguments — connects to Brown’s saturated-system harm thesis elsewhere in the book.