Steve Luxenberg polled historians before embarking on a book that seeks to expose the missing connective tissue between the primary players in the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. An admirable book and an easy read, it’s tightly constructed and offers new insight into its subjects.

The book joins four biographies—that of Albion Tourgeé, Henry Brown, William Marshall Harlan, and of the group of mixed-race New Orleanians dubbed les gens de couleurs—and weaves them together in a net comprised of citations from letters, journals, court documents, and newspaper accounts. It’s a tapestry of primary and secondary documents that converges on the moment in history when Reconstruction’s last ember died out.

After starting with a necessary note about offensive language, Luxenberg draws a Gilded Age society very much interested in classifying and characterizing those other than white, of creating separation. He underscores it with selected photos and ephemera, especially effective among them the graphic of “various grades of the coloured people.” 

Luxenberg establishes his four separate characters with long flourishes as the book begins: Tourgeé, Brown, and Harlan receive mini-biographies, while les gens de couleurs are taken as a whole until they recede behind the barely sketched Homer Plessy. Luxenberg uses a “cast of characters” page to lay out the supporting roles, which can get confusing. It’s helpful but also serves as notice that things will get convoluted before they become clearer.

Luxenberg whorls us into long passages of these lives and begins to draw them together in earnest after the Civil War, but they converge only in the last fifth of the book. There’s very little of Plessy himself, still, because the information and archives simply don’t exist—a common problem for lives mostly conducted out of public notice. There’s lots of Brown here, and even Luxenberg suggests to a degree that he was inconsequential or replaceable. Harlan has his own book and so does Tourgeé; Luxenberg refreshes readers on those justices (the recent Canellos book on Harlan adds to this well). His history’s still canted toward the people who wrote letters and won in court—as, at this point, it can only be.

Luxenberg’s core idea builds readily. “Separate” did not emerge sui generis from slavery; it was in place in the North before it became contentious in the South. “No matter what name it went by,” he writes, “the abolitionists of Massachusetts wanted the separate car for colored passengers banished from the state’s new railways.” (p. 3) I wonder if other readers were taken aback to see this story start some fifty, sixty years before the decision—or if they paused or put the book down when he went deep into personal lives of people who mattered but seemed less of note. 

I’m talking about Justice Brown here, mostly, though it’s interesting that his presence during Michigan’s constitutional convention raised the idea of voting rights for Black people and women. (p. 223) Brown’s part of the story seems leaden, but it maps a necessary angle: the story of progress through a judicial system for its jurists as well as cases. Tourgeé and Harlan come across as the more compelling characters because of their stark contrasts— Tourgeé’s admissions of carpetbagging, his peripatetic life, his troubles finances; Harlan’s partial disavowal of his own Southern-ness, his “betrayal” in his vote on Plessy. 

It still amazes me but shouldn’t, that Supreme Court cases even in this era were “chosen” for their tests of the law. Did it happen in the court’s earliest years? Tourgeé’s arguments sound prescient, very modern, and perhaps too advanced for the moment: he argued that skin color was a kind of property, as it had a tangible value in how a person was considered and what luxuries of life were available to them (p. 472). Luxenberg signs on with the worldview that the Court operates in arrears of public behavior, often ratifying only the least controversial of societal changes—or acting as a destructive force against social good. 

It’s difficult to sustain tension with a verdict that’s been public for more than a century. Still, it’s compelling and telling that the local attorney Walker, who advised Tourgeé on his arguments, had serious misgivings about the case (p. 420), especially its affirmation that Mississippi’s separate car law could not be overruled in the name of interstate commerce. Luxenberg draws out the conclusion that the ruling in Plessy reinforced the Court’s custom of observing local custom and tradition instead of nationalizing law around higher principles. In the end he concludes that the case’s questions were decided in Plessy by legislatures controlled by whites, and by custom—also controlled by whites. (p. 410) He sums up the futility of arguing the central question of the case: “Was Plessy white or colored?” (p. 489). Plessy himself would answer three different ways in various Censuses taken after the decision. 

In his acknowledgements, Luxenberg finally makes it plain: his book explores the story of the idea of separation in the nineteenth century. Would it have been better had it shown other examples of separate spheres of life? It’s largely academic and constitutional here, but that’s enough. The attempts to fashion a unified nation of people both Black and white, the hope that the 13th and 14th Amendment would be an effective tool to do so, were futile. Along with the 1883 Supreme Court decision that rendered the Civil Rights Act of 1875 dead, the Plessy decision was the last one that could have bridged the vast social gap between Black (and Indian) and white America. A ruling in Harlan’s direction would have been impossible, but it would have been revolutionary.