San Antonio College Library

When Homer A. Plessy, a New Orleans shoemaker, refused to move to the "Jim Crow" railroad car set aside for Negroes by state law, he initiated a lawsuit challenging the entire system of racial segregation. Fireside traces the roots of the Supreme Court decision that enshrined racial separation in America for the next 60 years.

Publisher's description: Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In this book, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had - raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters,...

Black and white Americans have occupied separate spaces since the days of "the big house" and "the quarters." But the segregation and racialization of American society was not a natural phenomenon that "just happened." The decisions, enacted into laws, that kept the races apart and restricted blacks to less desirable places sprang from legal reasoning which argued that segregated spaces were right, reasonable, and preferable to other arrangements. In...