Homer Plessy
Homer Adolph Plessy was an American shoemaker and activist who was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. He staged an act of civil disobedience to challenge one of Louisiana's racial segregation laws and bring a test case to force the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation laws. The Court decided against Plessy. The resulting "separate but equal" legal doctrine determined that state-mandated segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as long as the facilities provided for both black and white people were putatively "equal". The legal precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson lasted into the mid-20th century, until a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning segregation, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Plessy was born a free person of color in a family of French-speaking Louisiana Creole people. Growing up during the Reconstruction era, Plessy lived in a society in which black children attended integrated schools, black men could vote, and interracial marriage was legal. However, many of those civil rights were eroded following the withdrawal of U.S. federal troops from the former Confederate States of America in 1877. In the 1880s, Plessy became involved in political activism, and in 1892, the civil rights group Comité des Citoyens recruited him for an act of civil disobedience to challenge Louisiana's Separate Car Act, which required separate accommodations for black and white people on railroads. On June 7, 1892, Plessy purchased a ticket for a "whites only" first-class train coach, boarded the train, and was arrested by a private detective hired by the group. Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against Plessy in a state criminal district court, upholding the law on the grounds that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroads within its borders. Plessy appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard the case four years later in 1896 and ruled 7–1 in favor of Louisiana, establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine as a legal basis for the Jim Crow laws which remained in effect into the 1950s and 1960s.
Early life and historical context
Plessy may have been born in 1858, 1862, or on March 17, 1863, under the name Homère Patris Plessy. He was the second of two children in a French-speaking Creole family in New Orleans, Louisiana. Later documents give his name as Homer Adolph Plessy or Homère Adolphe Plessy. His father, a carpenter named Joseph Adolphe Plessy, and his mother, a seamstress named Rosa Debergue, were both mixed-race free people of color. Homer's paternal grandfather, Germain Plessy was a white Frenchman born in Bordeaux circa 1777. Germain Plessy lived in the French Saint-Domingue colony, before moving to New Orleans during the 1790s as part of a group of thousands of European settlers who fled the Haitian Revolution. Germain Plessy later lived with Catherine Mathieu, a free woman of color of French and African ancestry, and they had eight children. According to pre-Civil War records, Homer's maternal grandparents were both of African descent or mixed race. Many of Homer's ancestors and relatives were property-owning tradesmen, including blacksmiths, carpenters, and shoemakers.Joseph Adolphe Plessy died in 1869. Two years later in 1871, Homer's mother married Victor M. Dupart, a clerk for the U.S. Postal Service who supplemented his income by working as a shoemaker. Dupart had six children from a previous marriage; in addition to bringing Homer and his sister Ida to the marriage, Plessy's mother had one child with Dupart. Plessy's stepfather was politically engaged, having paid poll taxes in 1869 and 1870 in order to vote. He also joined the Unification Movement of 1873, a civil rights movement promoting political equality, racial unity, and an end to discrimination in Reconstruction-era Louisiana.
Keith Medley notes that Plessy grew up in a society in which black men had gained unprecedented civil rights in Louisiana. Beginning in 1868, all black men could vote if they paid a poll tax. The state implemented a racially integrated school system in 1869. The state legislature legalized interracial marriage in 1868. And more than 200 black men held elected offices at the state and local levels in the 1870s. However, Medley writes that many of those gains eroded following the withdrawal of U.S. federal troops from the former Confederacy in 1877. When white Democrats returned to power in the late 1870s, they began to defund public education for black people.
Plessy worked as a shoemaker and may have also done carpentry, according to a relative. During the 1880s, he worked at Patricio Brito's shoe-making business in New Orleans's French Quarter. He married nineteen-year-old Louise Bordenave at St. Augustine Church on July 14, 1888; Brito served as a witness. In 1889, he and his wife moved to Faubourg Tremé, a racially integrated middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans at the time, and he registered to vote in the Sixth Ward's Third Precinct. He was also a freemason.
Medley writes that Plessy's political involvement began in the post-Reconstruction 1880s. In 1887, he served as vice-president of the fifty-person Justice, Protective, Educational, and Social Club, a group dedicated to reforming public education in New Orleans. Not only had Louisiana abolished racially integrated schools in 1879, but many of the public schools in New Orleans were unable to stay open in the 1880s due to a lack of funding. In response, the organization published a pamphlet declaring its intention to collect and build a community library and appealing to the Louisiana state government for "our fair share of public education" with safeguards against "fraud and manipulation, thereby insuring good teachers, a full term and all necessary articles for the maintenance of schools, which at this moment we have not."
There is no known photograph of Homer Plessy, though a photograph of P. B. S. Pinchback, a former governor of Louisiana, has been misattributed as Plessy.
''Plessy v. Ferguson''
Orchestrating a test case
In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, which required separate accommodation for black and white people on railroads, including separate railway cars. A group of 18 prominent black, creole of color, and white creole New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens to challenge the law. Many staff members of The New Orleans Crusader, a black Republican newspaper, were among the group's members, including publisher Louis A. Martinet, writer Rodolphe Desdunes, and managing editor L. J. Joubert, who served as president of the Justice, Protective, Educational, and Social Club at the same time Plessy was vice president.The group contacted attorney and civil rights advocate Albion W. Tourgée, who agreed to help them bring a test case to court in order to force the judiciary to determine the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws. In his correspondence with Martinet, Tourgée suggested finding a plaintiff who had "not more than one-eight colored blood" and could pass as white. The attorney hoped that by selecting a person of ambiguous racial identity, he might exploit the Louisiana legislature's failure to define race and to force the court to consider the inconclusiveness of scientific evidence on definitive racial categories. In court, he later argued that a man of one-eighth African ancestry may not even know to which race he belongs, so a railroad employee would be even less qualified to "decide the question of race" and determine in what car a mixed-race individual ought to sit.
Tourgée also suggested finding a female plaintiff, because he believed the courts might be more sympathetic to a woman being ejected from a railroad car. However, the Comité des Citoyens instead recruited musician Daniel Desdunes, the son of group member Rodolphe Desdunes. Martinet contacted several railroad companies to inform them of the group's intentions. The railroads overwhelmingly opposed the Separate Car Act because it raised their operating costs by forcing them to use additional cars that might only be at half capacity. Some companies enforced the law, while others did not. Martinet eventually enlisted the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company to participate in the group's plan. On February 24, 1892, Daniel Desdunes purchased a first-class ticket on a train bound for Mobile, Alabama. After he sat in a "whites only" car, the conductor stopped the train, and a private detective hired by the Comité des Citoyens arrested Desdunes. The prosecution dropped their case against Desdunes in May 1892, however, after the Louisiana State Supreme Court ruled that the Separate Car Act did not apply to interstate railroad trips.
In order to bring their test case to court, the Comité des Citoyens had to stage another incident on a train trip entirely within Louisiana state lines. They recruited Plessy, who may have been a friend of Rodolphe Desdunes, to be the plaintiff. Martinet contacted the East Louisiana Railroad, one of the companies that opposed the law, and declared their intentions to stage an act of civil disobedience. He also hired the services of private detective Chris C. Cain to arrest Plessy and ensure that he was charged with violating the Separate Car Act and not with a misdemeanor such as disturbing the peace.
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad running between the Press Street Depot in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana, an approximately 30-mile journey that would have taken two hours. He sat in the "whites only" passenger car. When conductor J. J. Dowling, who was also in on the staged act, came to collect Plessy's ticket, he told Plessy to leave the "whites only" car. Plessy refused. The conductor stopped the train, walked back to the depot, and returned with Detective Cain. Cain and other passengers forcibly removed Plessy from the train. Cain then arrested Plessy and took him to the Orleans Parish jail. The Comité des Citoyens arrived at the jail, arranged for him to be released, and paid his $500 bond the following day by offering up a committee member's house as collateral.