Homer Plessy

Homer Adolphe Plessy (March 17, 1863 – March 1, 1925) was an American octoroon (because of an African-American great-grandmother), famous as the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Arrested, tried and convicted of a violation of Louisiana's racial segration laws, he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The resulting decision against him had wide consequences for the U.S. civil rights movement for over 50 years.

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Homer Plessy, photograph courtesy African American Registry.com. Despite the photograph, Plessy was specifically chosen to break the Separate Car law because he was light-skinned enough to pass for white.

Plessy was born Homère Patris Plessy on St. Patrick’s Day, less than three months after the Emancipation Proclamation, in New Orleans, Louisiana. His middle name later appears as Adolph or Adolphe after his father. His birth certificate lists his father as Adolphe Plessy, a carpenter, and Rosa Debergue, a seamstress. Both were classified as free people of color or Creoles of color, with African and French or Spanish forebears. Adolphe Plessy died when Homer was seven years old, but in 1871, his mother Rosa married Victor M. Dupart who worked as a clerk at the post office, but who supplimented his income as a shoemaker. Later, Homer too became a shoemaker. During the 1880’s, he worked at Patricio Brito’s shoe making business on Dumaine Street near North Rampart. In 1887, at the age of 24, Plessy became vice-president of an activist group called the Justice, Protective, Educational, and Social Club – a group dedicated to reforming public education in New Orleans, one of his first forays into activism. The next year, twenty-five-year old Homer Plessy and nineteen-year old Louise Bordenave were joined in marriage, with Plessy’s employer Patricio Brito serving as witness. In 1889, Homer and Louise moved to Faubourg Tremé at 1108 North Claiborne Avenue. He registered to vote in the Sixth Ward’s Third Precinct.

After the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy faded back into relative anonymity. He fathered children and later sold insurance. Homer Plessy died in 1925. His obituary was simple: "Plessy - on Sunday, March 1, 1925, at 5:10 a.m. beloved husband of Louise Bordenave." He was buried in the Debergue-Blanco family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery #1.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The Citizens' Committee of African Americans and Creoles, a civil rights group, upset by the recently enacted Separate Car law and other segregation acts, hired Albion Winegar Tourgée, a white New York attorney, who had previously fought for the rights of African-Americans, to lead the challenge against the law.

In 1892, the Citizens' Committee asked Plessy to agree to violate Louisiana's Separate Car law, which required the segregation of passenger trains by race. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad, running between New Orleans and Covington, and sat in the "whites only" passenger car. When the conductor came to collect his ticket, he told him that he was 1/8 African American, and that he refused to sit in the "blacks only" car. Plessy was immediately arrested by Detective Chris C. Cain, booked into the parish jail, and released the next day on a $500 bond.

Plessy's case was heard before Judge John Ferguson one month after his arrest. Tourgée argued that Plessy's civil rights, as granted by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, had been violated. Ferguson denied this argument and ruled that Louisiana, under state law, had the power to set rules that regulated railroad business within its borders.

The Louisiana State Supreme Court affirmed the judge's ruling and refused to grant a rehearing, but did allow a petition for writ of error. This petition was accepted by the United States Supreme Court and four years later, in April 1896, arguments for Plessy v. Ferguson began. Tourgée argued that the state of Louisiana had violated the Thirteenth Amendment, which granted freedom to the slaves, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which stated, "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, and property, without due process of law."

On May 18, 1896, Justice Henry Billings Brown delivered the majority opinion in favor of the state of Louisiana. In part, the opinion read, "The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to the either. ... [I]f the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of voluntary consent of the individuals."

The lone dissenting vote was cast by Justice John Marshall Harlan. In his dissenting opinion, the first Justice Harlan wrote: "I am of opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States."

The "Separate but Equal" doctrine, enshired by the Plessy ruling, remained valid until 1954, when it was largely undermined by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and later outlawed completely by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.