Board favors pardon of 1896 law defier

NEW ORLEANS — A Louisiana board Friday voted to pardon Homer Plessy, whose decision to sit in a “whites-only” railroad car to protest discrimination led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling affirming state segregation laws.

The state Board of Pardons’ unanimous decision to clear the Creole man’s record of a conviction now goes to Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has final say over the pardon. A spokesman didn’t indicate how the governor would act on the request.

The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that state racial segregation laws didn’t violate the Constitution as long as the facilities for the races were of equal quality.

The Plessy v. Ferguson decision cemented racial segregation for another half-century, justifying whites-only spaces in trains and buses, hotels, theaters, schools and other public accommodations until the Supreme Court unanimously overruled it with their Brown v. the Board of Education decision in 1954.

Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker, described in the Supreme Court opinion as of “one-eighth African blood,” was arrested in 1892 after boarding the train car as part of an effort by civil rights activists to challenge a state law that mandated segregated seating. The 18-member Citizens Committee was trying to overcome laws that rolled back post-Civil War advances in equality.

Police forcibly removed Plessy from the car, and he was imprisoned in the parish jail. Plessy pleaded guilty to violating the Separate Car Act a year later and was fined $25. He died in 1925 with the conviction still on his record.