MAN WHOSE ARREST CODIFIED SEGREGATION PARDONED
Black activist refused to leave Whites-only rail car
Louisiana’s governor on Wednesday posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest for refusing to leave a Whitesonly railroad car in 1892 led to the Supreme Court ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into U.S. law for half a century.
The state Board of Pardons last year recommended the pardon for Plessy, who boarded the rail car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn a state law segregating trains. Instead, the protest led to the 1896 ruling known as Plessy v. Ferguson, which solidified Whites-only spaces in public accommodations such as transportation, hotels and schools for decades.
At a ceremony held near the spot near where Plessy was arrested, Gov. John Bel Edwards said he was “beyond grateful” to help restore Plessy’s “legacy of the rightness of his cause ... undefiled by the wrongness of his conviction.”
Keith Plessy, whose greatgreat-grandfather was Plessy’s cousin, called the event “truly a blessed day for our ancestors ... and for children not yet born.”
Since the pardon board vote in November, “I’ve had the feeling that my feet are not touching the ground because my ancestors are carrying me,” he said.
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote in the 7-1 decision: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.”
Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only dissenting voice, writing 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” — an 1857 decision that said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen.
The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling allowing racial segregation across American life stood as the law of the land until the Supreme Court unanimously overruled it in 1954, in Brown v. the Board of Education. Both cases argued that segregation laws violated the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection. The Brown decision led to widespread public school desegregation and the eventual stripping away of Jim Crow laws that discriminated against Black Americans.
Plessy was a member of the Citizens Committee, a New Orleans group trying to overcome laws that rolled back post-Civil War advances in equality.
The 30-year-old shoemaker lacked the business, political and educational accomplishments of most of the other members, 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 discernable” — positioned him 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.
Eight months after the ruling in his case, Plessy pleaded guilty and was fined $25 at a time when 25 cents would buy a pound of round steak and 10 pounds of potatoes.