Homer Plessy
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Homer Adolph Plessy (March 17, 1863 – March 1, 1925) was the American plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Arrested, tried and convicted of a violation of Louisiana's racial segregation laws--his great, great-grandmother was black--he appealed to the Supreme Court. The resulting "separate-but-equal" decision against him had wide consequences for the U.S. civil rights for the next half century.
Plessy was born Homère Patris Plessy in New Orleans, Louisiana, on St. Patrick’s Day 1863, not quite three months after the issuance of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. His middle name later appears as Adolph or Adolphe after his father, a carpenter, on his birth certificate. His parents were classified as free people of color or Creoles of color, with African and French or Spanish forebears. Adolphe Plessy died when Homer was seven years old, but in 1871, his mother Rosa Debergue Plessy, a seamstress, married Victor M. Dupart, who was a clerk for the U.S. Post Office, but who supplemented his income as a shoemaker. Later, Plessy too became a shoemaker. During the 1880s, he worked at Patricio Brito’s shoe making business on Dumaine Street near North Rampart. New Orleans city directories from 1886-1924 list his occupations as shoemaker, laborer, clerk, and insurance agent. ["Homer Adolph Plessy", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 2 (1988), p. 655]
In 1888, Plessy, then twenty-five years old, married nineteen-year old Louise Bordenave, with Plessy’s employer Brito serving as a witness. In 1889, the Plessys moved to Faubourg Tremé at 1108 North Claiborne Avenue. He registered to vote in the Sixth Ward’s Third Precinct.
Plessy seems to have led a rather ordinary life; however, by 1887, he became vice-president of the Justice, Protective, Educational, and Social Club – a group dedicated to reforming public education in New Orleans.
[edit] Plessy v. Ferguson
The "Citizens' Committee of African Americans and Creoles", a civil rights group, upset by the recently enacted Separate Car law and other segregation acts, hired Albion Winegar Tourgée, a white New York City attorney, who had previously fought for the rights of African Americans, to lead the challenge against the law.
In 1892, the Citizens' Committee asked Plessy to agree to violate Louisiana's Separate Car law, which required the segregation of passenger trains by race. On June 7, 1892, Plessy, then twenty-nine years old, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad, running between New Orleans and Covington, the seat of St. Tammany Parish, and sat in the "whites- only" passenger car. When the conductor came to collect his ticket, Plessy told him that he was 7/8 white and that he refused to sit in the "blacks-only" car. Plessy was immediately arrested by Detective Chris C. Cain, booked into the parish jail, and released the next day on a $500 bond.
Plessy's case was heard before Judge John Ferguson one month after his arrest. Tourgée argued that Plessy's civil rights, as granted by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, had been violated. Ferguson denied this argument and ruled that Louisiana, under state law, had the power to set rules that regulated railroad business within its borders.
The Louisiana State Supreme Court affirmed the judge's ruling and refused to grant a rehearing, but did allow a petition for writ of error. This petition was accepted by the United States Supreme Court and four years later, in April 1896, arguments for Plessy v. Ferguson began. Tourgée argued that the state of Louisiana had violated the Thirteenth Amendment, which granted freedom to the slaves, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which stated, "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, and property, without due process of law."
On May 18, 1896, Justice Henry Billings Brown delivered the majority opinion in favor of the State of Louisiana. In part, the opinion read, "The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to the either. ... If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of voluntary consent of the individuals."
The lone dissenting vote was cast by Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentucky Republican. In his dissenting opinion, the first Justice Harlan wrote: "I am of opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States."
The "Separate but Equal" doctrine, enshrined by the Plessy ruling, remained valid until 1954, when it was overturned by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and later outlawed completely by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though the Plessy case did not involve education, it formed the legal basis of separate school systems for the following fifty-eight years.
[edit] After the Supreme Court case
After the Supreme Court ruling, Plessy faded back into relative anonymity. He fathered children, continued to participate in the religious and social life of his community, and later sold and collected insurance for the People’s Life Insurance Company. Plessy died in 1925 at the age of sixty-one, with his obituary reading, "Plessy - on Sunday, March 1, 1925, at 5:10 a.m. beloved husband of Louise Bordenave." He was buried in the Debergue-Blanco family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery #1.
