Homer Plessy, key to ‘separate but equal,’ on road to pardon
NEW ORLEANS >> A Louisiana board on Friday voted to pardon Homer Plessy, whose decision to sit in a “whitesonly” 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.
“Gov. Edwards is traveling today but looks forward to receiving and reviewing the recommendation of the Board upon his return” Tuesday evening, spokeswoman Christina Stephens said.
The Plessy v. Ferguson decision cemented racial segregation for another half-century, justifying whitesonly 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. 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.
“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. Later, he told the pardon board that he remembers meeting civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who refused in 1955 to leave a whites-only seat on a bus in Birmingham, Alabama, and kneeling to honor her.
“She said to me, ‘Get up boy, your name is Plessy — you’ve got work to do,’” Keith Plessy said.