Homer Plessy Memorial

On my visit to new Orleans, I visited the grave of one of the heroes of the civil rights movement, Homer Plessy.
Homer Plessy was, in many ways, an unlikely standard-bearer for the cause of black equality. Born in 1863 (months after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln) to free parents, he had never known slavery. He had never worked in agriculture, instead supporting himself through artisanal (shoe making) and professional (insurance salesman) work in New Orleans. Homer Plessy was seven-eighths white. With just one African-American great-grandparent, the light-skinned Plessy appeared to be white but was legally defined as black under Louisiana law. The fact that Plessy didn't look black would make it easy for him to infiltrate the whites-only car without encountering any resistance, thus highlighting the arbitrary discrimination of the law.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Plessy and the Citizens' Committee organized their challenge to the Separate Car Law with the complete cooperation of the East Louisiana Railroad. The railroad was apparently less interested in defending white supremacy than in making a profit. It cost money to provide separate cars for whites and blacks on every train. So when Plessy bought a first-class ticket and boarded the train on 7 June 1892, the railroad hired a private detective to ride along to make sure that someone was on hand to arrest him.
Plessy, the Citizens' Committee, and the East Louisiana Railroad all hoped that the court would vindicate Plessy by overturning the railroad segregation law as unconstitutional. Instead, Judge John Ferguson rejected the Citizens' Committee's constitutional arguments and convicted Homer Plessy for breaking the law. The Louisiana Supreme Court then upheld the verdict, before the United States Supreme Court finally agreed to hear the case in 1896.
The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson dealt a devastating blow to Homer Plessy and all other African-Americans. By a 7-1 majority, the justices upheld Louisiana's Jim Crow railroad act, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment offered no protection to "social rights" and that, "if one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane." The court explicitly rejected Plessy's argument that segregation was inherently demeaning, taking a gratuitous slap at Jim Crow's victims by describing as a "fallacy" the idea that "the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority."
Only one justice, John Marshall Harlan— a southerner and former slaveholder—dissented from the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, recognizing segregation as a "badge of servitude" inherently degrading to black citizens. "In the view of the constitution," Harlan wrote, "in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law." But Justice Harlan's ringing defense of colorblind democracy was at least half a century ahead of its time. In 1896, the overwhelming majority of the American people, like the overwhelming majority of the Supreme Court, did tolerate classes among citizens, and Plessy v. Ferguson guaranteed that Jim Crow laws designed to enforce divisions among those classes would be protected from constitutional challenge. By so firmly and unambiguously endorsing the logic of segregation in Plessy, the Supreme Court all but encouraged states to pass ever more draconian laws to separate blacks from whites in all spheres of public life. John Marshall Harlan's more egalitarian interpretation of the law would, eventually, be vindicated—but not until 1954, when the Supreme Court reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education. For the intervening 58 years, Jim Crow would be the law of the land. Plessy failed to achieve his goal, but he was brave to try.