Civil rights icon Plessy’s pardon sent to governor

NEW ORLEANS — A Louisiana board 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 Friday to clear the Creole man’s record of a conviction now goes to Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has final say over the pardon.

“Gov. Edwards is traveling today but looks forward to receiving and reviewing the recommendation of the Board upon his return” Tuesday evening, spokesperson Christina Stephens said.

The Plessy vs. 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 vs. the Board of Education decision in 1954. That decision led to the widespread desegregation of schools and the eventual stripping away of vestiges of the Jim Crow laws that discriminated against Black citizens.

The pardon recommendation came as New Orleans began a weekend marking the tumultuous integration of its public schools on Nov. 14, 1960, six years after the Brown decision.

“I think it will be a very good thing to pardon Mr. Homer Plessy after all these years,” Leona Tate, 67, said at a

City Hall news conference, where she stood between Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost. The three, as 6 year olds, were escorted by U.S. marshals past angry white mobs and into McDonogh #19 elementary school building, the same day Ruby Bridges, the subject of an iconic Norman Rockwell painting, entered the all-white William Franz Elementary School in another part of town.

Keith Plessy, 64, who is descended from a cousin of Homer Plessy, attended the news conference. He and Phoebe Ferguson, the greatgreat-granddaughter of John Howard Ferguson, the judge who oversaw the case in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, now lead a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights education.

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

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.

Bill Haber / Associated Press 2011 Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the principals in the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, stand in front of a plaque in New Orleans marking the case in 2011.