Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards shows a posthumous pardon he signed, on Jan. 5, 2022, for Homer Plessy, a Black man who refused to leave a whites-only train car in New Orleans in 1892, in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn a Jim Crow law segregating trains in Louisiana.Janet McConnaughey/The Associated Press
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. Instead, it led to legal backing for decades of segregation efforts across the U.S.
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.
“It felt like an enormous weight had been lifted, not just off of us but off the country,” said Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great-granddaughter of John Ferguson, the judge who found Mr. Plessy guilty of being on the wrong train car. She was among those who gathered Wednesday for the pardon ceremony, held near the spot Mr. Plessy bought his train ticket in 1892.
It was a moment of recognition, of past harms but also modern-day injustices. “We need to as a country acknowledge and repair to the best of our ability the egregious laws that we have passed with the purpose of discriminating against others,” Ms. Ferguson said in an interview.
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.
“Mr. Plessy’s conviction should never have happened. But, there is no expiration on justice. No matter is ever settled until it is settled right,” Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said Wednesday. But he also acknowledged that “the pernicious effects of Plessy linger still in terms of race relations, equality and justice. We are not where we should be.”
In the United States today, Black life expectancy is more than three years short of white, Black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites and earn, on average, 20 per cent less.
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.Bill Haber/The Associated Press
Mr. Plessy, a Louisiana-born Creole man of African and Haitian descent, died in 1925.
The 1896 decision that bears his name is often called one of the worst in U.S. history, a ruling that gave legal support not only to discrimination against Black people, but against other groups, including people of Chinese descent.
The ruling became a “signal to all of these pro-segregation, racist states – yes, this is fine. Go ahead,” said Williamjames Hoffer, a historian at Seton Hall University who has written a book on the Plessy case. Even across northern states, hundreds of towns excluded people of colour, some with policies that barred Black people after sunset.
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.
The Plessy decision would not be cast away for nearly 60 years, in part after Rosa Parks echoed Mr. Plessy’s action when she refused to give up a bus seat to a white passenger.
His pardon nonetheless carries a measure of irony, since it undoes a deliberate act. “They wanted to be prosecuted. There was no other way to challenge the law,” said Steve Luxenberg, author of another book on the case. Mr. Plessy, in fact, did not appeal his conviction. He appealed, instead, Justice Ferguson’s ruling that the Separate Car Act was constitutional.
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.
“Here is an institution that is taking responsibility for an unjust, unfair law,” Mr. Luxenberg said. “And I think that’s meaningful in our times, now.”
Mr. Plessy’s act was part of an ambitious legal attempt to overturn segregation, including by arguing that in denying him a white identity – Mr. Plessy was Caucasian in appearance – the railroad conductor was damaging his earning power, and therefore violating his constitutional rights since “earning power is property,” said Brook Thomas, who wrote a casebook on Plessy v. Ferguson.
Keith Plessy and his wife Marietta Plessy walk to a train behind the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts after the posthumous pardon ceremony.KATHLEEN FLYNN/Reuters
Had he won, “it would have been groundbreaking.”
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.
Instead, the Supreme Court decision affirmed the state’s prerogative. Still today, employment, marriage and voting rights depend “in various degrees on state authority to define, categorize, and deny or abridge freedom of personal identity,” he wrote in a recent article. “The most intimate and essential life activities remain captive to Plessy’s legacy.”
That underscores the complexity of addressing what the Plessy decision brought to the U.S.
“We cannot ameliorate the injustices that flowed from the Plessy decision,” Prof. Davis said. What the pardon “does in terms of actual reconciliation is probably nil.”
In Louisiana, however, the case has led to a very personal effort to undo its legacy. In 2009, Ms. Ferguson partnered with Keith Plessy, the first cousin three times removed of Mr. Plessy. They created a foundation dedicated to using their families’ interwoven history as a tool to encourage unity and understanding. They speak in schools and the pardon will change how they teach the history of the case, Ms. Ferguson said.
Now, “it will have a different ending,” she said. “I think the positive outcome will be inspirational to students. Even if it took a while to get here.”
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