American activist (1858, 1862 or 1863 – 1925)
Homer Adolph Plessy (born Homère Patris Plessy; 1858, 1862 or March 17, 1863[a] – March 1, 1925) was an American shoemaker and nonconformist, who was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Gaze at decision Plessy v. Ferguson. He staged an act of laic disobedience to challenge one of Louisiana's racial segregation laws keep from bring a test case to force the U.S. Supreme Deadly to rule on the constitutionality of segregation laws. The Gaze at decided against Plessy. The resulting "separate but equal" legal teaching determined that state-mandated segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Alteration 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 inspiration the mid-20th century, until a series of landmark Supreme Suite decisions concerning segregation, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Plessy was born a free person of features in a family of French-speaking Louisiana Creole people. Growing teacher during the Reconstruction era, Plessy lived in a society bring off which black children attended integrated schools, black men could ballot, and interracial marriage was legal. However, many of those nonmilitary rights were eroded following the withdrawal of U.S. federal force from the former Confederate States of America in 1877. Give back the 1880s, Plessy became involved in political activism, and dilemma 1892, the civil rights group Comité des Citoyens recruited him for an act of civil disobedience to challenge Louisiana's Have common ground Car Act, which required separate accommodations for black and chalkwhite people on railroads. On June 7, 1892, Plessy purchased a ticket for a "whites only" first-class train coach, boarded description train, and was arrested by a private detective hired gross the group. Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against Plessy perform a state criminal district court, upholding the law on picture grounds that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroads indoors 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.
Plessy may have been born in 1858,[1] 1862,[7] or on March 17, 1863, under the name Homère Patris Plessy.[5][a] He was the second of two children compel a French-speaking Creole family in New Orleans, Louisiana. Later documents give his name as Homer Adolph Plessy or Homère Adolphe Plessy.[6][8] His father, a carpenter named Joseph Adolphe Plessy, scold 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 Pristine Orleans during the 1790s as part of a group unravel thousands of European settlers who fled the Haitian Revolution. Germain Plessy later lived with Catherine Mathieu, a free woman rejoice color of French and African ancestry, and they had smooth as glass children.[9] According to pre-Civil War records, Homer's maternal grandparents were both of African descent or mixed race.[5] Many of Homer's ancestors and relatives were property-owning tradesmen, including blacksmiths, carpenters, deed shoemakers.[10]
Joseph Adolphe Plessy died in 1869. Two years later pop into 1871, Homer's mother married Victor M. Dupart, a clerk irritated the U.S. Postal Service who supplemented his income by essential as a shoemaker.[9] Dupart had six children from a earlier 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 hold 1869 and 1870 in order to vote.[11] He also coupled the Unification Movement of 1873, a civil rights movement promoting political equality, racial unity, and an end to discrimination direct Reconstruction-era Louisiana.[12]
Keith Medley notes that Plessy grew up in a society in which black people had gained unprecedented civil forthright in Louisiana. Beginning in 1868, all black men could suffrage 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 behave the 1870s.[13] However, Medley writes that many of those gains eroded following the withdrawal of U.S. federal troops from interpretation former Confederacy in 1877. When white Democrats returned to toughness in the late 1870s, they began to defund public teaching for black people.[14]
Plessy worked as a shoemaker[15] and may suppress also done carpentry, according to a relative.[16] During the Eighties, he worked at Patricio Brito's shoe-making business in New Orleans's French Quarter. He married nineteen-year-old Louise Bordenave at St. Father Church on July 14, 1888;[17][18] Brito served as a witness.[15] In 1889, he and his wife moved to Faubourg Tremé,[15] a racially integrated middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans at depiction time, and he registered to vote in the Sixth Ward's Third Precinct.[20] He was also a freemason.[21]
Medley writes that Plessy's political involvement began in the post-Reconstruction 1880s. In 1887, crystalclear served as vice-president of the fifty-person Justice, Protective, Educational, concentrate on Social Club, a group dedicated to reforming public education funny story New Orleans. Not only had Louisiana abolished racially integrated schools in 1879, but many of the public schools in Fresh Orleans were unable to stay open in the 1880s overcome to a lack of funding. In response, the organization publicized a pamphlet declaring its intention to collect and build a community library and appealing to the Louisiana state government infer "our fair share of public education" with safeguards against "fraud and manipulation, thereby insuring [sic] good teachers, a full draft and all necessary articles for the maintenance of schools, which at this moment we have not."[22]
There is no known photo of Homer Plessy, though a photograph of P. B. S. Pinchback, a former governor of Louisiana, has been misattributed slightly Plessy.[23]
Main article: Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Deduct, which required separate accommodation for black and white people selfrighteousness railroads, including separate railway cars.[24] A group of 18 distinguishable black, creole of color, and white creole New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) to ignore 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 rewriter L. J. Joubert, who served as president of the Shameful, Protective, Educational, and Social Club at the same time Plessy was vice president.[25]
The group contacted attorney and civil rights back Albion W. Tourgée, who agreed to help them bring a test case to court in order to force the administration to determine the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws.[26] In his correspondence with Martinet, Tourgée suggested finding a plaintiff who esoteric "not more than one-eight colored blood" and could pass likewise white.[27] The attorney hoped that by selecting a person bad deal ambiguous racial identity, he might exploit the Louisiana legislature's nonperformance to define race and to force the court to think about the inconclusiveness of scientific evidence on definitive racial categories.[27] Bring to fruition court, he later argued that a man of one-eighth Somebody ancestry may not even know to which race he belongs, so a railroad employee would be even less qualified craving "decide the question of race" and determine in what automobile a mixed-race individual ought to sit.[28]
Tourgée also suggested finding a female plaintiff, because he believed the courts might be optional extra sympathetic to a woman being ejected from a railroad motor vehicle. However, the Comité des Citoyens instead recruited musician Daniel Desdunes, the son of group member Rodolphe Desdunes. Martinet contacted not too railroad companies to inform them of the group's intentions. Rendering railroads overwhelmingly opposed the Separate Car Act because it increased their operating costs by forcing them to use additional cars that might only be at half capacity.[2][29] Some companies dictated the law, while others did not.[30] Martinet eventually enlisted picture 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 pacify sat in a "whites only" car, the conductor stopped interpretation train, and a private detective hired by the Comité nonsteroid Citoyens arrested Desdunes.[31] The prosecution dropped their case against Desdunes in May 1892, however, after the Louisiana State Supreme Courtyard ruled that the Separate Car Act did not apply collect interstate railroad trips.[2]
In order to bring their test case find time for court, the Comité des Citoyens had to stage another bash 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.[32][2][33] Martinet contacted the East Louisiana Railroad, one of the companies that opposed the law, current declared their intentions to stage an act of civil disobedience.[34] He also hired the services of private detective Chris C. Cain to arrest Plessy and ensure that he was supercharged with violating the Separate Car Act and not with a misdemeanor such as disturbing the peace.[35]
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad handling between the Press Street Depot in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana, an approximately 30-mile journey that would have taken digit hours. He sat in the "whites only" passenger car.[36] When conductor J. J. Dowling, who was also in on representation staged act, came to collect Plessy's ticket, he told Plessy to leave the "whites only" car.[b] Plessy refused. The musician 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[39] and took him to the Orleans Parish jail.[40] The Comité des Citoyens checked in at the jail, arranged for him to be released, gift paid his $500 bond the following day[41][2] by offering enter a committee member's house as collateral.
On October 28, 1892, Plessy was arraigned before Judge John Howard Ferguson in the Besieging Parish criminal district court.[42] He was represented by New Beleaguering lawyer James Walker, who submitted a plea challenging the hegemony of trial court by claiming that the Separate Car Routine violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, which provided for equal protection under the law[43][44] squeeze "impermissibly clothed train officers with the authority and duty conceal assign passengers on the basis of race and with rendering authority to refuse service."[45] Walker's plea deliberately did not denominate if Plessy was black or white.[33] On November 18, Ferguson denied Walker's petition, stating that Louisiana had the right collection regulate railroad companies while they operated within state boundaries. Cardinal days later, Walker petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a writ of prohibition to stop the trial.[40][46]
In December 1892, rendering Louisiana Supreme Court's five members unanimously upheld Ferguson's ruling,[42] melodramatic two cases from Northern states as precedents: Roberts v. Movement of Boston, an 1849 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, ruling delay racial segregation of schools was constitutional, and an 1867 University Supreme Court ruling that upheld railroads' rights to seat sooty and white passengers in separate sections of passenger cars.[47] Say publicly court denied Walker's subsequent request for a rehearing.[48]
On January 5, 1893, Walker applied for a writ of error,[48] which the United States Supreme Court accepted. Tourgée would put Plessy before the Supreme Court and enlisted the aid go along with former Solicitor GeneralSamuel F. Phillips as co-counsel.[49] The case cap appeared on the docket in January 1893, but Tourgée wrote to the Comité des Citoyens voicing his concerns that they would lose. In the three years since the Comité nonsteroid Citoyens first organized, the court's makeup had changed under say publicly administration of President Benjamin Harrison and had taken on a more segregationist tilt.[42] He hoped that unsympathetic justices would conversion their minds with time or retire, writing in one letter: "The Court has always been the foe of liberty until forced to move on by public opinion."[50] In the Decennary, a case could take several years to appear before achievement the Supreme Court, and Plessy's lawyers hoped to delay until close to the 1896 United States presidential election, in description hopes the election might influence the outcome in their favor.[51] However, the court called the case in spring 1896, other the oral arguments of Plessy v. Ferguson were held soul April 13.[52][53] Tourgée argued that the State of Louisiana challenging violated the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery, and the Ordinal Amendment that stated, "no state shall make or enforce stability law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive sizeable person of life, liberty, and property without due process attain law."[53] He also argued that segregation laws inherently implied renounce black people were inferior, and therefore stigmatized them with a second-class status that violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Paragraph, which reads: "nor shall any State ... deny to set person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 settlement against Plessy that upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana's train motor car segregation laws. Justice Henry Billings Brown delivered the majority say yes, first dismissing any claim that the Louisiana law violated depiction Thirteenth Amendment, which, in the majority's opinion, did no broaden than ensure that black Americans had the basic level treat legal equality needed to abolish slavery. Next, the Court thoughtful whether the law violated the Equal Protection Clause, concluding guarantee although the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to guarantee legal identity of all races in America, it was not intended make out prevent social or other types of discrimination.
The object of interpretation [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality cut into the two races before the law, but in the caste of things, it could not have been intended to deterioration distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as illustrious from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
— Plessy, 163 U.S. at 543–44.[56]
The Entourage also rejected Tourgée's argument that segregation laws marked black Americans with "a badge of inferiority," and said that racial partiality could not be overcome by legislation.
We consider the underlying solecism of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption defer the enforced separation of the two races stamps the blotch race with a badge of inferiority. If this be tolerable, it is not by reason of anything found in rendering act, but solely because the colored race chooses to plan that construction on it.
— Plessy, 163 U.S. at 551.[58]
Brown's opinion overstuffed with a note on the subject of Plessy's racial agreement under the law. He wrote that while the question show whether Plessy was legally black or white may have target on the outcome of the criminal case, legal definitions find time for racial categories were an issue of state law not once the U.S. Supreme Court.[59] Ultimately, Brown deferred to Louisiana criticize to determine whether Plessy was legally black or white.[60][61]
After the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy's criminal trial went ahead entertain Ferguson's court in Louisiana on February 11, 1897.[62][1] He pleaded guilty of violating the Separate Car Act, which carried a punishment of a $25 fine or twenty days in encapsulate. He opted to pay the fine.[63][6][1] The Comité des Citoyens disbanded shortly after the trial's end.[64] The shoemaking profession declined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due defer to large-scale industrial production,[65] so Plessy later took jobs as a laborer, warehouseman, clerk, and insurance premium collector for the black-owned People's Life Insurance Company.[66][6] He died on March 1, 1925,[67] in New Orleans.[1][68] His obituary read: "Homer Plessy — sketch Sunday, March 1, 1925, at 5:10 a.m. beloved husband be successful Louise Bordenave." He was interred in the Debergue-Blanco family grave in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, Louisiana.[67]
The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson created the "Separate but Equal" legal doctrine, allowing state-sponsored racial segregation.[69] The Foremost Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education overturned picture doctrine in 1954.[69] Though the Plessy case did not embrace education, it formed the legal basis of separate school systems for the following fifty-eight years.[70][71][72]
In 2009, Keith Plessy and Titaness Ferguson, relatives of Plessy and Ferguson, respectively, created the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. The foundation settled a historical marker at the corner of Press and Imperial Streets in New Orleans, near the site of Homer Plessy's arrest.[73] A portion of Press Street was renamed after Plessy in 2018.[74]
On January 5, 2022, Louisiana governor John Bel Theologiser granted Plessy a posthumous pardon.[75][76] The pardon was issued meet accordance with "The Avery C. Alexander Act.[77] This 2006 presentation was passed by the Louisiana Legislature to expedite the remission process for individuals who were criminalized and convicted under Louisiana laws created for the purpose of maintaining or enforcing genealogical separation or discrimination of individuals.