Video: 'Separate But Equal: Homer Plessy and the Case That Upheld the Color Line'
(Tuesday, June 7, 1892; during the Civil rights movement (1865–1896)) — Homer Plessy, a racially mixed shoemaker from New Orleans, was arrested today for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad, committing an act of civil disobedience to challenge one of Louisiana’s racial segregation laws and bring a test case to force the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation laws.
Plessy, born a free person of color in a family of French-speaking Louisiana Creole people, had bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad running between the Press Street Depot in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana, an approximately thirty-mile journey that would have taken two hours. He sat in the “whites only” passenger car.
When conductor J. J. Dowling came to collect Plessy’s ticket, he told Plessy to leave the “whites only” car. Plessy refused. The conductor stopped the train, walked back to the depot, and returned with private detective Chris C. Cain. Cain and other passengers forcibly removed Plessy from the train.
Video: 'Louisiana board pardons Homer Plessy ahead of the 125th anniversary of Plessy v. Ferguson'
Cain then arrested Plessy and took him to the Orleans Parish jail. The Comité des Citoyens arrived at the jail, arranged for him to be released, and paid his $500 bond the following day by offering up a committee member’s house as collateral.
Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled against Plessy in a state criminal district court, upholding the law on the grounds that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroads within 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 that would remain in effect into the 1950s and 1960s.
