Louisiana’s governor posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest sparked the SCOTUS ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into law.
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s governor on Wednesday posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest for refusing to leave a whites-only railroad car in 1892 to protest racial segregation sparked the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into law for half a century.
Justice John 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.
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.
Keith Plessy, whose great-great-grandfather was Plessy’s cousin, said donations collected by the committee paid the fine and other legal costs. But Plessy returned to obscurity, and never returned to shoemaking.
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