The history of segregation in Louisiana runs from the early 1890s to the mid-1960s, a stretch of roughly seventy-five years in which state law separated Black and white residents in schools, transportation, public accommodations, marriage, housing, and the voting booth. Louisiana wrote the statute behind Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that gave “separate but equal” its constitutional cover, and the state’s 1898 Constitution became a model for disenfranchising Black voters across the South. The system was taken apart piece by piece through lawsuits led by Black attorneys and clients, federal court orders, and the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s.
The Separate Car Act and Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 111, the Separate Car Act, requiring railroads to provide separate coaches or partitioned sections for white and Black passengers. Sitting in the wrong car carried a $25 fine or up to twenty days in jail.1National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Sixteen Black legislators serving in the state assembly at the time opposed the bill, and the Black community in New Orleans opposed it publicly.
A group of eighteen New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens in September 1891 for the sole purpose of overturning the law. They hired Albion W. Tourgée, a white attorney from New York, and local lawyer James C. Walker, and arranged a coordinated test arrest. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, classified as Black under Louisiana law despite being seven-eighths European in ancestry, bought a ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad and sat in the whites-only car. A private detective hired by the committee made the arrest.2Oyez. Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-1 against Plessy. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority that state-imposed racial separation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause so long as the separate facilities were ostensibly equal.2Oyez. Plessy v. Ferguson Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone: “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”3Legal Information Institute. Plessy v. Ferguson The ruling stood for fifty-eight years and gave every segregating state a legal shield for schools, parks, hospitals, and restaurants. Louisiana posthumously pardoned Plessy on January 5, 2022.4Library of Congress. The Posthumous Pardon of Homer Plessy
Disenfranchisement Under the 1898 Constitution
Two years after Plessy, Louisiana’s Bourbon Democrats called a constitutional convention to lock in white political control. Thomas Semmes, chair of the judiciary committee, told delegates the purpose openly: “We met here to establish the supremacy of the white race, and the white race constitutes the Democratic Party of this State.”564 Parishes. Louisiana Constitution of 1898
The 1898 Constitution attacked Black voting through several overlapping mechanisms. Article 197 required any man registering to vote to write out his application by hand, in English or his native language, without assistance, in the presence of a registrar.6Tennessee Secretary of State. Constitution of the State of Louisiana, 1898 Applicants who could not read could still register if they owned property assessed at $300 or more with taxes current. Section 5 of the same article, the grandfather clause, exempted any man whose father or grandfather had been eligible to vote before January 1, 1867, from both requirements. Almost no Black men had been eligible before that date, so the clause protected illiterate white voters while blocking Black citizens regardless of education.
Article 198 added a poll tax of one dollar per year for the two years before an election, payable by December 31 of the preceding year, with receipts required at the polls.7Yale University. State Constitution of Louisiana, 1898, Suffrage and Elections For sharecroppers and laborers earning a few dollars a week, paying two years of tax in advance was often impossible. Registrars also held broad discretion over who passed the literacy test, and there was no meaningful appeal.
The results were immediate and severe. Black registered voters in Louisiana fell from about 130,000 before the new constitution to roughly 5,000 by 1900 and about 1,000 by 1904, out of a Black population above 650,000.8Equal Justice Initiative. Louisiana Officially Disenfranchises Black Voters and Jurors When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses in 1915, Louisiana’s 1921 constitution replaced the provision with an “interpretation test” requiring applicants to give a “reasonable interpretation” of a constitutional clause, with registrars deciding what counted.9Library of Congress. Louisiana v. United States The exclusion continued under a new name.
Convict Leasing and Sharecropping
Segregation was also a labor system. After the Civil War, Black Codes required Black residents to sign annual labor contracts with white employers, and vagrancy statutes let authorities arrest anyone unemployed or in breach of contract. Those arrests fed the convict lease system. In 1870, former Confederate Major Samuel L. James won the lease of the entire Louisiana State Penitentiary population. He bought several plantations, including the original Angola Plantation, and put inmates to work in the fields. Black inmates were subleased to landowners; white inmates got clerical and craft assignments. Deaths climbed as James pushed longer hours, drawing enough public outcry to become a political issue.10Louisiana Prison Museum. History of Angola The 1898 Constitution ended convict leasing by prohibiting the practice.
Sharecropping produced a parallel form of forced labor outside the prison walls. Planters advanced seed, tools, and supplies at high interest, and when the harvest fell short of the debt, the cycle repeated. Workers who tried to leave could be arrested for breaking their contracts. Debt peonage kept hundreds of thousands of Black families tied to specific plantations well into the twentieth century.
Segregation in Daily Life
Louisiana law reached into nearly every public space. Parks, libraries, theaters, and cemeteries were divided by race, with the facilities designated for Black residents almost always inferior. Municipal ordinances set separate seating on streetcars and buses, with white passengers loading from the front and Black passengers from the rear.11Law Library of Louisiana. Johnnie A. Jones Sr., Civil Rights Lawyer – Bus Boycott Lincoln Beach, opened in 1938 on Lake Pontchartrain, was the only lakefront site open to Black residents of New Orleans; performers who appeared there included Fats Domino, The Drifters, and Nat King Cole.12The City of New Orleans. Lincoln Beach Restoration It existed because the other public beaches were closed to them.
Louisiana had prohibited interracial marriage since 1894. In 1910, the legislature made cohabitation between Black and white residents a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, and in 1914 it became a crime to officiate an interracial wedding.13Equal Justice Initiative. Louisiana Broadens Ban on Interracial Marriage The state did not repeal its interracial marriage ban until 1972, five years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all such laws in Loving v. Virginia.
Housing was segregated through restrictive covenants that barred sales or leases to non-white buyers, and some communities operated as sundown towns where Black residents were expected to leave by nightfall. Where a person could live, eat, swim, marry, and be buried all turned on race.
Segregated Schools and the Fight to Open Them
Louisiana ran fully separate school systems, and “equal” was a fiction. White schools received more funding, better buildings, newer books, and higher-paid teachers. Attorney A.P. Tureaud and Thurgood Marshall filed sixteen lawsuits during the 1940s challenging the pay gap between Black and white teachers in New Orleans, pressure that led the state legislature to adopt a minimum salary schedule for all teachers regardless of race in 1948.14Law Library of Louisiana. A.P. Tureaud, Legendary Louisiana Lawyer – Law Career
Louisiana’s universities were whites-only. When Tureaud sued in 1946 to open LSU’s law school, the legislature responded by opening a law division at all-Black Southern University rather than integrating. Tureaud kept litigating. In 1950, a federal court found Southern’s law program did not offer educational opportunities equal to LSU’s and ordered LSU to admit qualified Black students; LSU appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. In fall 1951, Pierre S. Charles, Robert F. Collins, and Ernest N. Morial became the first Black students at LSU’s law school.14Law Library of Louisiana. A.P. Tureaud, Legendary Louisiana Lawyer – Law Career Tureaud’s suits opened LSU’s medical school in 1951, its graduate school in 1952, and its undergraduate programs in 1953.
The Baton Rouge Bus Boycott
Two years before Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Black residents of Baton Rouge organized the first large-scale bus boycott of the civil rights era. Reverend T.J. Jemison led a citywide boycott starting June 18, 1953, after the bus company refused to honor a new city ordinance allowing first-come, first-served seating. The boycott lasted eight days. Organizers ran a “free-ride” network of volunteer drivers, a model Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association would use directly during the Montgomery boycott two years later.15Zinn Education Project. Baton Rouge Bus Boycott Begins The settlement kept the two front side seats for white passengers and the long rear seat for Black passengers, filling the rest by order of boarding. A partial win, and a blueprint that spread across the South.
The 1960 New Orleans School Crisis
After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Louisiana’s legislature passed an interposition resolution calling the ruling “null, void and of no effect,” and voters approved a constitutional amendment authorizing the state to use police powers to keep schools segregated.16Equal Justice Initiative. Massive Resistance Lawmakers threatened to close any school that complied with federal integration orders.
Compliance came on November 14, 1960. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges, escorted by four federal marshals, entered William Frantz Elementary School as the first Black student at a previously all-white school in New Orleans. That same day, Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne integrated McDonogh No. 19 Elementary. All four faced screaming crowds.17Equal Justice Initiative. White Mobs Violently Riot Against Six-Year-Old Ruby Bridges Integrating Elementary School White parents pulled their children from William Frantz. For most of that first year, Bridges was taught alone by Barbara Henry, a teacher from Boston, while marshals kept the mob back at the doors.18U.S. Marshals Service. Deputy U.S. Marshals Escort Ruby Bridges to School in 1960
How Legal Segregation Was Dismantled
The legal structure came apart in stages. Litigation by A.P. Tureaud and others attacked segregated institutions one at a time, from teacher pay to university admissions to public schools. His 1952 suit against the Orleans Parish School Board directly challenged school segregation and helped set the stage for the 1960 integration order.
Federal legislation finished the job. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations, invalidating the state and local ordinances that had governed everyday life. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned the literacy and interpretation tests that Louisiana registrars had used for decades and imposed preclearance requirements on jurisdictions with histories of voter suppression, meaning Louisiana had to get federal approval before changing voting rules or district lines.19Supreme Court of the United States. Louisiana v. Callais Black voter registration, held near zero for most of the century, began climbing quickly. The statutes were gone, but the effects of decades of underfunded schools, restricted work, residential segregation, and political exclusion carried forward.