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We
as Freemen
Plessy
v. Ferguson
By
Keith Medley
Reviews
In
June 1892, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy [1863-1925]
bought
a first-class railway ticket from his native New Orleans to
Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The two-hour trip had
hardly begun when Plessy was arrested and removed from the
train. Though Homer Plessy was born a free man of color and
enjoyed relative equality while growing up in Reconstruction-era
New Orleans, by 1890 he could no longer ride in the same
carriage with white passengers. Plessy’s act of civil
disobedience was designed to test the constitutionality of the
Separate Car Act, one of the many Jim Crow laws that threatened
the freedoms gained by blacks after the Civil War. This largely
forgotten case mandated separate-but-equal treatment and
established segregation as the law of the land. It would be
fifty-eight years before this ruling was reversed by Brown v.
Board of Education. Hardcover.
--Publisher
In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, Louisiana's famous Supreme Court
Case, established the separate-but-equal doctrine that prevailed
in America until the Brown v. Board of Education decision in
1954. Homer Plessy's arrest in a New Orleans railway car was not
mere happenstance, but the result of a carefully choreographed
campaign of civil disobedience planned by the Comité des
Citoyens. this group of Republican free men of color had watched
their rights disappear under the increasingly strict Jim Crow
laws of the post-Reconstruction period. To contest these new
restrictions, they arranged for Plessy, who could
"pass" for white, to illegally seat himself in a
whites-only carriage.
Keith Weldon Medley brings to life
the players in this landmark trial, from the crusading black
columnist Rodolphe Desdunes and the other members of the Comité
des Citoyens to Albion W. Tourgee, the outspoken writer who
represented Plessy, to John Ferguson, a reformist carpetbagger
who nonetheless found Plessy guilty. The U.S. Supreme Court
sustained the finding, with only John Marshall Harlan, a
Southern associate justice, voting against the decision.
--Publisher
Expanding
his 1994 Smithsonian magazine article, Medley deftly puts
in colorful context the U.S. Supreme Court's signal 1896
decision sanctioning so-called separate but equal facilities in
public accommodations in what has been called apartheid
American-style. His ten chapters transform the six-year Plessy
v. Ferguson case from a century-old legal landmark into a
resonant illustration of the remorseless racism that eroded the
civil rights promises made by the United States during
Reconstruction.
Rich
in family and community history and local lore, Medley's work
details the world of New Orleans's free people of color, who
produced and scripted the events, recruited the cast of players,
and staged the dramatic challenge to segregation. An excellent
complement to the scholarly works of Charles A. Lofgren, Otto H.
Olson, and Brook Thomas, this remarkable read is recommended for
public and academic library collections on U.S., African
American, and local history.
--Library
Journal, Thomas J. Davis (Arizona State University)
* * *
* *
1896 Case Set the Tone for
Change
By Lolis Eric Elie
|
In the view of the
Constitution, 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 not tolerates classes among citizens. --
Plessy v Ferguson, 1896, Statement by John Marshall
Harlan, dissenting Supreme Court Justice |
Keith Weldon medley started his research about
Homer Plessy [1863-1925] with the same assumptions that many people hold about
the famous plaintiff.
Even a century after the Treme resident tested
the doctrine of separate but equal in an 1896 Supreme Court case.
Plessy is still misunderstood.
"I just assumed that Homer Plessy was
someone on the train passing for white, and when he got caught, he
got a lawyer," said medley, author of the new book We as
Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. "I realize now it was a very
meticulously planned civil disobedience action."
Plessy's protest was sparked by the 1890
passage of the Louisiana separate car law, which mandated
segregation in railroad transit. It was planned with the urging of
state Sen. Murphy Foster, the grandfather of our current governor.
"He was angry at black legislators for supporting the state
lottery," Medley said. "As revenge for that, he got the
separate car act passed."
In response, the black community formed the
Comité des Citoyens, or Citizens Committee, and set out about
fighting the racist law. members had cooperation from some
unlikely allies. "They hired the detective to arrest Plessy
so that they could get him charged with the right thing,"
Medley said.
They also obtained the cooperation of the
railroad, because Plessy was light-skinned enough to pass for a
white person, so the conductor might have had difficulty
identifying him. "The railroads did not like this law because
of the expense," Medley said. "Theoretically, if one
black person showed up, they would have to set up a whole other
car."
The Plessy case is the most famous example of
the work of the Citizens Committee, but it was engaged in other
activities as well.
"The Citizens Committee also put out a
newspaper called the Crusader," Medley said. "It
was the only black daily in the country and the only Republican
newspaper in the South."
The group also fought for Jim Murray, a black
man accused of killing a white prison guard. In his 1896 case, Murray
v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court decided that African-Americans
could not be jurors. But ultimately the ideals put forth by Plessy
and Murray prevailed in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision outlawing segregation in schools. "The NAACP lawyers
in that case used many of the same arguments that Plessy and his
lawyers had used in their case," Medley said.
Source: The Times-Picayune (16 May
2003)
We as
Freeman: Plessy v. Freemen is published by Pelican Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 3110, Gretna, LA 70054 / 1-504-368-1175 / Fax: 1-504-368-1195 /
1-800-843-1724 or 1888-5PELICAN
www.pelicanpub.com *
* * * *
update 12
November 2008 |
