Railroad Company v. Brown

84 U.S. (17 Wall.) 445 (1873)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

P was given a grant to operate that required several provisions. One was that no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color. P contends it obeyed the direction because it has never excluded the colored class of persons from the cars, but on the contrary, has always provided accommodations for them. Brown, a colored woman, on the 8th of February, 1868, anterior to the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, bought a ticket to come from Alexandria to Washington. No tickets were distinguished as for white persons or colored persons, nor for any particular sort or class of cars. All were exactly alike. Brown went to take her place in the cars there were standing there two cars, alike comfortable -- the one, however, set apart for colored persons and the other 'for white ladies, and gentlemen accompanying them,' the regulation having been that in going down from Washington to Alexandria, the first should be occupied by the former, and the last by the latter, and that in coming back, the use should be simply reversed. When about to get into one of the cars, a servant of the persons managing the road, stationed near the cars to direct passengers, told Brown (P) not to get into the car into which she was about to enter, but to get into the one before it; that he had been instructed by persons in charge of the road not to permit colored persons to ride in the car in which she was getting, but to have them go in the other. Brown (P) persisted in going into the car appropriated for white ladies, and the man put her out with force, and as she alleged, some insult. She then got into the car into which she had been directed to get -- the one assigned to colored people -- was carried safely into Washington, and got out there. Brown (P) sued in the Supreme Court of the District. D requested an instruction to the effect that if the cars in all respects were equal P cannot object to them being separate but equal. The court refused, and P got a verdict for $1500, and D appealed.