Homer Plessy

Bronze plaque on the side of the Plessy tomb in New Orleans.

Homer Adolph Plessy (March 17, 1862 – March 1, 1925) was the American plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Arrested, tried and convicted of a violation of one of Louisiana's racial segregation laws, he appealed through Louisiana state courts to the U.S. Supreme Court, and lost. The resulting "separate-but-equal" decision against him had wide consequences for civil rights in the United States. The decision legalized state-mandated segregation anywhere in the United States, as long as the facilities provided for both blacks and whites were putatively "equal".

Plessy, born in 1862 on St. Patrick's Day, grew up at a time when black people in New Orleans could marry whomever they chose, sit in any streetcar seat, and attend integrated schools. As an adult, Homer Plessy found that those gains from the period of Federal occupation during the Civil War and the Reconstruction era had been abolished after troops were withdrawn in 1877..

On any other day in 1892, Plessy with his pale skin color could have ridden in the car restricted to white passengers without notice. He was classified "7/8 white" or octoroon according to the language of the time. Although it is often interpreted as Plessy had only one great grandmother of African descent, both of his parents are identified as free persons of color on his birth certificate. The racial categorization is based on appearance rather than genealogy.

Hoping to strike down segregation laws, the Citizens' Committee of New Orleans (Comité des Citoyens) recruited Plessy to violate Louisiana's 1890 separate-car law. To pose a clear test, the Citizens' Committee gave advance notice of Plessy's intent to the railroad, which had opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the commuter train that ran to Covington, sat down in the car for white riders only and the conductor asked whether he was a colored man, Medley said. The committee also hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state's separate-car law.

Everything the committee plotted went as planned except for result, which was the Supreme Court decision in 1896.

By then the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court had gained a more segregationist tilt, and the committee knew it would likely lose. But it chose to press the cause anyway, Medley said. "It was a matter of honor for them, that they fight this to the very end."

After the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy faded back into relative anonymity. He fathered children, continued to participate in the religious and social life of his community, and later sold and collected insurance for the People’s Life Insurance Company. Plessy died in 1925 at the age of sixty-one, with his obituary reading, "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.

Biography

Homer Plessy was born Homère Patrice Plessy March 17, 1863 in Man on Your Binder City to Joseph Adolphe Plessy and Rosa Debergue, members of New Orleans' free people-of-color caste.Another in the free people-of-color caste was Plessy's compatriot, Walter L. Cohen, who obtained an appointment as customs inspector from U.S. President William McKinley.

Homer Plessy's paternal grandfather was Germain Plessy, a white Frenchman born in Bordeaux circa 1777. Germain Plessy arrived in New Orleans with thousands of other Haitian expatriates who fled Haiti in the wake of the slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture that wrested Haiti from Napoleon in the 1790s. Germain Plessy married Catherine Mathieu, a free woman of color, and they had eight children, including Homer Plessy's father, Joseph Adolphe Plessy.

Homer Plessy was born less than three months after the issuance of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. His middle name would later appear as Adolphe after his father, a carpenter, on his birth certificate. His parents were classified as free people of color or Creoles of color, with African and French forebears. Adolphe Plessy died when Homer was seven years old, but in 1871, his mother Rosa Debergue Plessy, a seamstress, married Victor M. Dupart, a clerk for the U.S. Post Office who supplemented his income by working as a shoemaker. Plessy too became a shoemaker. During the 1880s, he worked at Patricio Brito’s shoe-making business on Dumaine Street near North Rampart. New Orleans city directories from 1886-1924 list his occupations as shoemaker, laborer, clerk, and insurance agent.

In 1888, Plessy, then twenty-five years old, married nineteen-year old Louise Bordenave, with Plessy’s employer Brito serving as a witness. In 1889, the Plessys moved to Faubourg Tremé at 1108 North Claiborne Avenue. He registered to vote in the Sixth Ward’s Third Precinct.

By 1887, Plessy became vice-president of the Justice, Protective, Educational, and Social Club, a group dedicated to reforming public education in New Orleans.

At age thirty, shoemaker Homer Plessy was younger than most members of the Comité des Citoyens. He did not have their stellar political histories, literary prowess, business acumen, or law degrees. Indeed, his one attribute was being white enough to gain access to the train and black enough to be arrested for doing so. This shoemaker sought to make an impact on society that was larger than simply making its shoes. When Plessy was a young boy, his stepfather was a signatory to the 1873 Unification Movement—an effort to establish principles of equality in Louisiana. As a young man, Plessy displayed a social awareness and served as vice president of an 1880s educational-reform group. And in 1892, he volunteered for a mission rife with unpredictable consequences and backlashes. Comité des Citoyens lawyers Albion Tourgee, James C. Walker and Louis Martinet vexed over legal strategy. Treasurer Paul Bonseigneur handled finances. As a contributor to the Crusader newspaper, Rodolphe Desdunes inspired with his writings. Plessy's role consisted of four tasks: get the ticket, get on the train, get arrested, and get booked.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Main article: Plessy v. Ferguson

The Comité des Citoyens ("Citizens' Committee") was a civil rights group made up of African Americans, whites, and Creoles. The committee vigorously opposed the recently enacted Separate Car Act and other segregation laws. They retained a white New York City attorney, Albion Winegar Tourgée, who had previously fought for the rights of African Americans.

In 1892, the Citizens' Committee asked Plessy to agree to violate Louisiana's Separate Car law that required the segregation of passenger trains by race. On June 7, 1892, Plessy, then thirty years old and resembling in skin color and physical features a white male, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad running between New Orleans and Covington, the seat of St. Tammany Parish. He sat in the "whites-only" passenger car. When the conductor came to collect his ticket, Plessy told him that he was 7/8 white and that he refused to sit in the "blacks-only" car. Plessy was immediately arrested by Detective Chris C. Cain, put into the Orleans Parish jail, and released the next day on a $500 bond.

Plessy's case was heard before Judge John Howard 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 Ferguson'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, that granted freedom to the slaves, and the Fourteenth Amendment, that 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. ... If 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, a Kentucky Republican. 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, enshrined by the Plessy ruling, remained valid until 1954, when it was overturned by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and later outlawed completely by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though the Plessy case did not involve education, it formed the legal basis of separate school systems for the following fifty-eight years.

Aftermath of the Supreme Court case

After the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy faded back into relative anonymity. He fathered children, continued to participate in the religious and social life of his community, and later sold and collected insurance for the People’s Life Insurance Company. Plessy died in 1925 at the age of sixty-one, with his obituary reading, "Homer 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.

Homer Plessy historical marker

The Plessy & Ferguson Foundation of New Orleans honored the successes of the civil rights movement February 12, 2009 by taking part in the placing of a historical marker at the corner of Press Street and Royal Street, the site of Homer Plessy’s arrest in New Orleans in 1892.

Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the players on both sides of the Supreme Court case, appeared together on television station WLTV in New Orleans February 10, 2009. They announced the formation of the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation for Education, Preservation and Outreach. The foundation will work to create new ways to teach the history of civil rights through film, art, and public programs designed to create understanding of this historic case and its effect on the American conscience. Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson appeared together at the site of the railroad tracks in New Orleans where Homer Plessy was denied seating.

According to a release by the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation, the 1892 arrest of Homer Plessy was part of an organized effort by "The Citizen’s Committee" to challenge Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. While many consider the Civil Rights movement to have begun in the 1950s, communities were organizing for equal rights much earlier. Although the United States Supreme Court ruled against Plessy in 1896, their arguments produced Justice John Marshall Harlan’s "Great Dissent". Some material in Justice Harlan's "Great Dissent" originated with papers filed with the court by "The Citizen’s Committee". The Committee’s use of civil disobedience and the court system foreshadowed the Civil Rights struggles of the 20th Century.

The documentary film, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans chronicles the history and little known details of the case, Plessy v. Ferguson. The award-winning film was shown on PBS stations in the U.S. in February 2009.

• Front of the marker placed Feb. 12, 2009 commemorating the planned arrest of Homer Plessy June 17, 1892 for violating the Louisiana 1890 Separate Car Act.
  Front of the marker placed Feb. 12, 2009 commemorating the planned arrest of Homer Plessy June 17, 1892 for violating the Louisiana 1890 Separate Car Act.
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  Back of the marker placed Feb. 12, 2009 recalling the arrest of Homer Plessy for violating segregationist state law.

Sources

• Elliott, Mark (2006). Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195181395. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Tushnet, Mark (2008). I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 69–80. ISBN 9780807000366. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Brook, Thomas (1997). Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Fireside, Harvey (2004). Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0786712937. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Lofgren, Charles A. (1987). The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation.. New York: Oxford University Press. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Medley, Keith Weldon (2003). We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Gretna, LA: Pelican. p. 252. ISBN 1589801202. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Review
• Chin, Gabriel J. (1996). "The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases". Iowa Law Review. 82: 151. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)