130 years after defying segregation, Plessy of ‘separate but equal’ ruling to be pardoned

Louisiana’s governor is slated to posthumously pardon Homer Plessy on Wednesday, more than a century after the Black resident was arrested in an unsuccessful challenge to a Jim Crow law creating “whites-only” train cars.

The Plessy vs. Ferguson case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose notorious ruling gave the green light to a half-century of laws calling for “separate but equal” accommodations that kept Black people in segregated schools, housing, theaters and other venues.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards scheduled the pardon ceremony for a spot near where Plessy was arrested in 1892 for breaking a Louisiana law requiring Black people to ride in cars that the law described as “equal but separate” from those for white customers. The date is close to the 125th anniversary of Plessy’s guilty plea in New Orleans.

Relatives of both Plessy and the judge who convicted him, John Howard Ferguson, are slated to be at the ceremony.

It spotlights New Orleans as the cradle of the civil rights movement, said Keith Plessy, whose great-great-grandfather was Plessy’s cousin — Homer Plessy had no children.

“Hopefully this will give some relief to generations who have suffered under discriminatory laws,” said Phoebe Ferguson, the judge’s great-great-granddaughter.

On Nov. 12, the state Board of Pardons recommended the pardon for Plessy, who was a 30-year-old shoemaker when he boarded the train car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn the discriminatory law.

Instead, the 1896 ruling solidified whites-only spaces in public accommodations until a later Supreme Court unanimously overturned it in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Anti-discrimination lawyers in both cases argued that segregation laws violated the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection.

In the Plessy case, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the 7-1 majority: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.”

Justice John Harlan, the dissenter, wrote that he believed the ruling “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case” — the notorious 1857 decision that said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen. It was overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments, passed in 1865 and 1866.

Plessy lacked the business, political and educational accomplishments of most other members of the group trying to strike down the segregation law, Keith Weldon Medley wrote in the book ”We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson.” But his light skin — court papers described him as someone whose “one-eighth African blood” was “not discernible” — positioned him strategically for the train car protest.

“His one attribute was being white enough to gain access to the train and black enough to be arrested for doing so,” Medley wrote.

Five blocks of the street on which he was arrested, renamed Homer Plessy Way in 2018, run through the campus of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. The ceremony was scheduled at the campus — outdoors for COVID-19 safety.

Eight months after the ruling in his case, Plessy pleaded guilty Jan. 11, 1897. He was fined $25 at a time when 25 cents would buy a pound of round steak and 10 pounds of potatoes. He died in 1925 with the conviction on his record.

Relatives of Plessy and Ferguson, the judge who oversaw his case in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, became friends decades later and formed a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights education.

Other recent efforts have acknowledged Plessy’s role in history, including a 2018 vote by the New Orleans City Council to rename in his honor a section of the street where he tried to board the train.