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)

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1896 Case Set the Tone for Change

By Lolis Eric Elie

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

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Keith Weldon Medley was born in New Orleans and grew up in the Faubourg Marigny, not far from where Homer Plessy lived. He attended St. Augustine High School and graduated from Southern University in New Orleans with a B.A. in sociology and psychology. A two-time recipient of publication initiative grants (2001 and 2002) from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Keith Weldon Medley has published articles in American Legacy, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Historic Preservation, New World Outlook, Atlanta Tribune, Facing South, Amistad Guide to Arc Light, The New Orleans Tribune, NSBE Journal, Southern Exposure, Preservation in Print and other periodicals. We as Freemen is expanded from an article Mr. Medley wrote for Smithsonian.

His essay on the Mardi Gras Indians appeared in the catalogue that accompanies The Ties That Bind: Making Faking Family New Orleans Style,  a photography exhibit underwritten by the Annie Casey Foundation. He is also a licensed tour guide for the City of New Orleans. The Forbes publication, American Legacy, featured a summer travel issue in 2000 with a cover story by Medley on sites of historical interest in New Orleans. In the year 2000, he gave a presentation and tour for members of the American Association for State and Local Historians who convened in New Orleans.

Medley has written a great deal on the New Orleans origins of the Plessy v. Ferguson. He authored the text of "When the Future Became the Past," a Tulane University and Louisiana State Museum touring exhibit that chronicles this pivotal United States Supreme Court case. During the 1996 centennial of the case, an interview of Medley by Scott Simon was broadcast on national Public Radio's "All Things considered." He was also featured on Louisiana's Public Broadcasting's popular show Louisiana: "The State We're In" and was interviewed in WDSU-TV's special report by Norman Robinson entitled "Bound for Freedom."

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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays Edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis  Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars and creative writers from Africa and the Americas. Called one of two significant critical works on Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late 1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of Carter G. Woodson and Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an historical context for understanding 20th-century creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone writers, such as Cuban Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist, and scholar Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the significance of Negritude in Latin America. This collaborative text set the tone for later conferences in which writers and scholars worked together to promote, disseminate, and critique the literature of Spanish-speaking people of African descent. . . . Cited by a literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."

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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America By Melissa V. Harris-Perry According to the author, this society has historically exerted considerable pressure on black females to fit into one of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the Matriarch or the Jezebel.  The selfless Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.      Professor Perry points out how the propagation of these harmful myths have served the mainstream culture well. For instance, the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for black females to feel a maternal instinct towards Caucasian babies. As for the source of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their own bodies during slavery given that they were being auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless, it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate indiscriminately.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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update 12 November 2008