For nearly 60 years, Homer Plessy’s surname made up one-half of a Supreme Court case that helped cement in law the second-class status of African-Americans in the United States. Only when Plessy v. Ferguson was toppled by another famous court ruling in 1954, with its “separate but equal” doctrine exposed as flawed, did Jim Crow laws begin to fade.
In fact, Plessy himself could scarcely have predicted his posthumous notoriety. He died in 1925, well before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ignited the long drama of racial integration.
Yet Plessy was not an accidental crusader against segregation. He was an active member of a New Orleans civil rights group that in 1892 was determined to challenge a newly enacted Louisiana law that established separate train cars for black riders and white riders.
On June 7 of that year, Plessy calmly boarded a “whites-only” passenger car on the East Louisiana Railroad near the corner of Press and Royal streets.
Concerned that his light complexion would not immediately give him away, Plessy informed the conductor that he was one-eighth black and that he would not move. He was arrested shortly after.
Plessy took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court but lost in 1896, and the language of Louisiana’s train law, requiring “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races,” would echo for decades.
It was a legal defeat with big ramifications, but it would not hold forever. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent forecast the ultimate outcome: “Our constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”