On June 7, 1892, shoe maker Homer Plessy boarded a first-class train car designated as whites-only in New Orleans. His subsequent arrest was an act meant to challenge the Separate Car Act of Louisiana.On Wednesday, the state of Louisiana formally pardoned Mr. Plessy, a gesture incapable of altering past centuries of racial inequity, but one that nonetheless raised hope about the willingness of institutions of authority to reckon with the past – and, perhaps, foment future change.
After Mr. Plessy’s arrest on the train, the Supreme Court, in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision, ruled that there was no constitutional ban on “distinctions based upon color” and upheld the Louisiana act’s requirement of “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on trains. Keith Plessy, left, and Phoebe Ferguson in front of a historical marker in New Orleans in June 2011. Keith Plessy is a descendant of Homer Plessy, who was found guilty of boarding a first-class train car designated as whites-only in New Orleans in 1892, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great-granddaughter of John Ferguson, the judge who found Mr. Plessy guilty in the case.Mr. Plessy, a Louisiana-born Creole man of African and Haitian descent, died in 1925.
Mr. Plessy’s pardon is “a very important symbolic gesture toward rectifying Louisiana’s, and much of the United States’s, long history of adverse discrimination on the basis of race – in other words, racism,” Prof. Hoffer said. But, Mr. Luxenberg noted, the pardon was championed by the same New Orleans district attorney’s office that prosecuted the case against Mr. Plessy 125 years ago.
Keith Plessy and his wife Marietta Plessy walk to a train behind the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts after the posthumous pardon ceremony.Indeed, at the heart of the Plessy case was “a question of who exactly an individual is, and what lineage does he or she get to declare as part of his or her identity,” said Thomas J. Davis, an Arizona State University legal historian.
Powerful words from Ayanna Pressley: 'We cannot remain silent when our government sends $3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children, and displace Palestinian families. A budget is a reflection of our values.'
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