When Plessy Tried to Board a Train
Good morning, it’s June 7. The Plessy v. Ferguson case began on this date in 1892 when a New Orleans resident named Homer Plessy boarded the first-class car at the Press Street train station heading for Covington, La.
Mr. Plessy never made it that far. He was escorted from the whites-only car and cited, setting in motion a four-year legal proceeding that culminated in one of the most noxious decisions in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Like the Scopes “monkey trial” that would come three decades later, Plessy v. Ferguson was not triggered by overzealous law enforcement. Plessy was a carefully planned challenge to Jim Crow.
During Reconstruction, blacks in New Orleans had full civil rights, but beginning in the 1880s, a spate of statutes reasserting white supremacy began being enacted in legislatures across the South, prohibiting interracial marriage, interracial mingling, and other basic rights. In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring train companies to provide separate railway carriages for whites and blacks.
For business considerations, if not altruism, the railroads opposed this law: it meant buying more train cars. Freed blacks in Louisiana resented it for a more personal reason. They saw it as a way of consigning blacks to a station in society they believed the Civil War had been fought to contravene. In New Orleans, a civil rights group called Comité des Citoyens (Citizens Committee) prepared a legal challenge.
Homer Plessy, a Treme shoemaker, was chosen both because he was gutsy and because he was mostly white — he could “pass” in the parlance of the day — meaning that his very appearance exposed the underlying irrationality of racism.
The case didn’t quite go the way the civil rights lawyers hoped. The trial judge was an Orleans Parish criminal courts magistrate named John Howard Ferguson. A Massachusetts native, Ferguson was thought to be sympathetic to blacks because he’d been an abolitionist before the Civil War, and he’d thrown out a previous test case involving interstate travel.
But Judge Ferguson, to his descendants’ regret, turned out to be a stickler for the law, and when it came to the Plessy case, he found the defendant guilty, ruling that Louisiana’s segregation laws did not run afoul of the 14th Amendment.
In subsequent appeals, then, the case became Plessy v. Ferguson. It was decided by the Supreme Court four years later on a 7-1 decision written by Justice Henry Billings Brown. The crux of the court’s explanation upholding the doctrine of “separate, but equal” came down to two sentences.
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” Justice Brown wrote. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
It’s hard to think of an instance in which a majority of the Supreme Court associated itself with a more odious or disingenuous assertion. Only one member of the court, Justice John Marshall Harlan, foresaw the terrible implications of this decision.
“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan wrote. “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
It would take a long time for that simple logic to reassert itself. Some say we’re not quite there yet. But four years ago, 52-year-old New Orleans bellman Keith Plessy and 51-year-old documentary filmmaker Phoebe Ferguson – two descendants of the 1892 principals – joined hands, literally, in unveiling a plaque at the site of the Press Street Railroad Yards.
Brought together for a photo-op, the black man and the white woman became friends. Together they launched a foundation “to create new and innovative ways to teach the history of civil rights.” The beauty of their association is conveyed in its very name, the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation.
It’s a seemingly small change, replacing the letter “v” – for the Latin word “versus” - with an ampersand that implies unity. But it’s a symbol of a very long journey.
