Louisiana's governor will pardon Homer Plessy, who was arrested in 1892 for challenging a ban on Black people sitting in “whites-only” train cars.
Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the principals in the Plessy V. Ferguson court case, pose for a photograph in front of a historical marker in New Orleans, on June 7, 2011. Homer Plessy, the namesake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling, will be posthumously pardonws.on Wednesday, more than a century after the Black man was arrested in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow a Jim Crow law creating “whites-only” train cars.
“Hopefully, this will give some relief to generations who have suffered under discriminatory laws,” said Phoebe Ferguson, the judge’s great-great-granddaughter.The state Board of Pardons recommended the pardon on Nov. 12 for Plessy, who was a 30-year-old shoemaker when he boarded the train car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn the law.
In Plessy, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the 7-1 majority: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.” Plessy lacked the business, political and educational accomplishments of most other members of the group trying to strike down the segregation law, Keith Weldon Medley wrote in the book ”We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson.” But his light skin — court papers described him as someone whose “one eighth African blood” was “not discernable” — positioned him for the train car protest.