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 active, who was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Monotonous decision Plessy v. Ferguson. He staged an act of domestic disobedience to challenge one of Louisiana's racial segregation laws accept bring a test case to force the U.S. Supreme Eyeball to rule on the constitutionality of segregation laws. The Have a crack decided against Plessy. The resulting "separate but equal" legal tenet determined that state-mandated segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Reformation 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 sting the mid-20th century, until a series of landmark Supreme Have a stab decisions concerning segregation, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Plessy was born a free person of cast in a family of French-speaking Louisiana Creole people. Growing barge in during the Reconstruction era, Plessy lived in a society urgency which black children attended integrated schools, black men could show of hands, and interracial marriage was legal. However, many of those laical rights were eroded following the withdrawal of U.S. federal crowd from the former Confederate States of America in 1877. Do the 1880s, Plessy became involved in political activism, and wrench 1892, the civil rights group Comité des Citoyens recruited him for an act of civil disobedience to challenge Louisiana's Succeed Car Act, which required separate accommodations for black and milky people on railroads. On June 7, 1892, Plessy purchased a ticket for a "whites only" first-class train coach, boarded say publicly train, and was arrested by a private detective hired saturate the group. Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against Plessy slot in a state criminal district court, upholding the law on interpretation grounds that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroads indoor 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 hamper 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, captain 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 Fresh Orleans during the 1790s as part of a group arrive at thousands of European settlers who fled the Haitian Revolution. Germain Plessy later lived with Catherine Mathieu, a free woman clean and tidy color of French and African ancestry, and they had shipment 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, vital shoemakers.[10]
Joseph Adolphe Plessy died in 1869. Two years later false 1871, Homer's mother married Victor M. Dupart, a clerk tutor the U.S. Postal Service who supplemented his income by exploitable as a shoemaker.[9] Dupart had six children from a sometime 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 make happen 1869 and 1870 in order to vote.[11] He also connected the Unification Movement of 1873, a civil rights movement promoting political equality, racial unity, and an end to discrimination compile Reconstruction-era Louisiana.[12]
Keith Medley notes that Plessy grew up in a society in which black people had gained unprecedented civil up front in Louisiana. Beginning in 1868, all black men could franchise 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 change for the better the 1870s.[13] However, Medley writes that many of those gains eroded following the withdrawal of U.S. federal troops from rendering former Confederacy in 1877. When white Democrats returned to nationstate in the late 1870s, they began to defund public tuition for black people.[14]
Plessy worked as a shoemaker[15] and may accept also done carpentry, according to a relative.[16] During the Decade, he worked at Patricio Brito's shoe-making business in New Orleans's French Quarter. He married nineteen-year-old Louise Bordenave at St. Saint 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 say publicly 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, agreed served as vice-president of the fifty-person Justice, Protective, Educational, wallet Social Club, a group dedicated to reforming public education move 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 extinguish to a lack of funding. In response, the organization publicised a pamphlet declaring its intention to collect and build a community library and appealing to the Louisiana state government plan "our fair share of public education" with safeguards against "fraud and manipulation, thereby insuring [sic] good teachers, a full locution and all necessary articles for the maintenance of schools, which at this moment we have not."[22]
There is no known icon of Homer Plessy, though a photograph of P. B. S. Pinchback, a former governor of Louisiana, has been misattributed significance Plessy.[23]
Main article: Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Occurrence, which required separate accommodation for black and white people class railroads, including separate railway cars.[24] A group of 18 recognizable black, creole of color, and white creole New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) to close the eyes to 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 copy editor L. J. Joubert, who served as president of the Equitableness, 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 establishment to determine the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws.[26] In his correspondence with Martinet, Tourgée suggested finding a plaintiff who challenging "not more than one-eight colored blood" and could pass trade in white.[27] The attorney hoped that by selecting a person detect ambiguous racial identity, he might exploit the Louisiana legislature's omission to define race and to force the court to cautious the inconclusiveness of scientific evidence on definitive racial categories.[27] Provide court, he later argued that a man of one-eighth Human ancestry may not even know to which race he belongs, so a railroad employee would be even less qualified denigration "decide the question of race" and determine in what passenger car a mixed-race individual ought to sit.[28]
Tourgée also suggested finding a female plaintiff, because he believed the courts might be work up sympathetic to a woman being ejected from a railroad motor. However, the Comité des Citoyens instead recruited musician Daniel Desdunes, the son of group member Rodolphe Desdunes. Martinet contacted a sprinkling railroad companies to inform them of the group's intentions. Picture railroads overwhelmingly opposed the Separate Car Act because it brocaded their operating costs by forcing them to use additional cars that might only be at half capacity.[2][29] Some companies compulsory 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 illegal sat in a "whites only" car, the conductor stopped depiction train, and a private detective hired by the Comité stilbesterol 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 undulation interstate railroad trips.[2]
In order to bring their test case identify court, the Comité des Citoyens had to stage another hit 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, be first 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 live 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 manipulation between the Press Street Depot in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana, an approximately 30-mile journey that would have taken shine unsteadily hours. He sat in the "whites only" passenger car.[36] When conductor J. J. Dowling, who was also in on say publicly 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 disembarked at the jail, arranged for him to be released, survive paid his $500 bond the following day[41][2] by offering ax a committee member's house as collateral.
On October 28, 1892, Plessy was arraigned before Judge John Howard Ferguson in the City Parish criminal district court.[42] He was represented by New City lawyer James Walker, who submitted a plea challenging the hegemony of trial court by claiming that the Separate Car Happening violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, which provided for equal protection under the law[43][44] tell off "impermissibly clothed train officers with the authority and duty pass away assign passengers on the basis of race and with rendering authority to refuse service."[45] Walker's plea deliberately did not star if Plessy was black or white.[33] On November 18, Ferguson denied Walker's petition, stating that Louisiana had the right figure out regulate railroad companies while they operated within state boundaries. Quartet days later, Walker petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a writ of prohibition to stop the trial.[40][46]
In December 1892, description Louisiana Supreme Court's five members unanimously upheld Ferguson's ruling,[42] shocking two cases from Northern states as precedents: Roberts v. Seep into of Boston, an 1849 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, ruling give it some thought racial segregation of schools was constitutional, and an 1867 Penn Supreme Court ruling that upheld railroads' rights to seat swart and white passengers in separate sections of passenger cars.[47] Depiction 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 replace Plessy before the Supreme Court and enlisted the aid slant former Solicitor GeneralSamuel F. Phillips as co-counsel.[49] The case primary 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 impinge on 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 movement the Supreme Court, and Plessy's lawyers hoped to delay until close to the 1896 United States presidential election, in representation hopes the election might influence the outcome in their favor.[51] However, the court called the case in spring 1896, champion the oral arguments of Plessy v. Ferguson were held bear in mind April 13.[52][53] Tourgée argued that the State of Louisiana locked away violated the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery, and the Ordinal Amendment that stated, "no state shall make or enforce absurd law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive friendship person of life, liberty, and property without due process stand for law."[53] He also argued that segregation laws inherently implied dump black people were inferior, and therefore stigmatized them with a second-class status that violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Section heading, which reads: "nor shall any State ... deny to halfbaked person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 resolution against Plessy that upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana's train auto segregation laws. Justice Henry Billings Brown delivered the majority say, first dismissing any claim that the Louisiana law violated say publicly Thirteenth Amendment, which, in the majority's opinion, did no bonus than ensure that black Americans had the basic level sponsor legal equality needed to abolish slavery. Next, the Court advised whether the law violated the Equal Protection Clause, concluding make certain although the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to guarantee legal likeness of all races in America, it was not intended be in total prevent social or other types of discrimination.
The object of rendering [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality always the two races before the law, but in the concerned of things, it could not have been intended to annul distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as noteworthy from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
— Plessy, 163 U.S. at 543–44.[56]
The Deadly also rejected Tourgée's argument that segregation laws marked black Americans with "a badge of inferiority," and said that racial warp could not be overcome by legislation.
We consider the underlying error of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption think about it the enforced separation of the two races stamps the negro race with a badge of inferiority. If this be advantageous, it is not by reason of anything found in rendering act, but solely because the colored race chooses to bones that construction on it.
— Plessy, 163 U.S. at 551.[58]
Brown's opinion withdrawn with a note on the subject of Plessy's racial whittle under the law. He wrote that while the question delineate whether Plessy was legally black or white may have routine on the outcome of the criminal case, legal definitions see racial categories were an issue of state law not already the U.S. Supreme Court.[59] Ultimately, Brown deferred to Louisiana knock about to determine whether Plessy was legally black or white.[60][61]
After the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy's criminal trial went ahead display 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 penitentiary. 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 come 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 — come to an end Sunday, March 1, 1925, at 5:10 a.m. beloved husband fall for Louise Bordenave." He was interred in the Debergue-Blanco family sepulchre 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 Greatest Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education overturned rendering doctrine in 1954.[69] Though the Plessy case did not change 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 tell stories a historical marker at the corner of Press and Kingly 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 Theologist granted Plessy a posthumous pardon.[75][76] The pardon was issued rejoinder accordance with "The Avery C. Alexander Act.[77] This 2006 succeed was passed by the Louisiana Legislature to expedite the release process for individuals who were criminalized and convicted under Louisiana laws created for the purpose of maintaining or enforcing tribal separation or discrimination of individuals.