Louisiana’s governor is preparing a posthumous pardon for Homer Plessy of the Plessy v Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Plessy was arrested in 1892 in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow a Jim Crow law creating “whites-only” train cars.
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.”
Justice John Harlan, the dissenter, wrote that he believed the ruling “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in theThat 1857 decision said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen. It was overturned by the 13th and 14th Amendments, passed in 1865 and 1866.
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.
Eight months after the ruling in his case, Plessy pleaded guilty on Jan. 11, 1897. He was fined $25 at a time when 25 cents would buy a pound of round steak and 10 pounds of potatoes. He died in 1925 with the conviction on his record. Relatives of Plessy and John Howard Ferguson, the judge who oversaw his case in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, became friends decades later and formed a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights education.
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