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Seat of
Honor
By Michael A. Ross
A review of Keith
Medley's
We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson On June 7, 1892, Homer Adolphe Plessy
[1863-1925] engaged in what would become one of the most famous
acts of civil disobedience in American history. That afternoon,
Plessy, who was of mixed race, boarded the East Louisiana
Railroad Company’s Covington-bound train, entered the
first-class, “whites only” car, and refused to leave when
the conductor told him to “retire to the colored car.”
Moments later the engineer brought the train to a halt and a
detective arrived to take Plessy into his custody, escorting him
to a police station on Elysian Fields Avenue. There Plessy was
charged formally with violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act
of 1890.
In We as Freemen, New Orleans writer
Keith Weldon Medley reminds readers that the events of the
afternoon were not spontaneous. Plessy did not simply decide on
the spur of the moment to break an unjust law. He was, instead,
handpicked for the task by the Comité des Citoyens, an
organization of prominent African-American civil libertarians
who had already raised the funds necessary for his legal
defense.
| They chose Plessy because, Medley writes, he
was “white enough to gain access to the train and black enough
to be arrested for doing so.” Members of the Comité des
Citoyens also had secretly secured the cooperation of senior
officials of the East Louisiana Railroad Company who opposed the
Separate Car Act because it “saddled their employees with the
burden of becoming the state’s race policemen” and meant
that their company had to provide costly “extra cars that
might only be half-used.”
Photo right: John
Ferguson (b.1838), Lower court judge of Plessy case |
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The railroad officials knew what Plessy
intended to do, embraced the idea of creating a legal test case
that might expose the moral and economic illogic of the law, and
were aware that the Comité des Citoyens had even hired a
detective to take Plessy into custody.
Too often, accounts of the ensuing case
against the state that became Plessy v. Ferguson (the state’s
judge who first ruled against Plessy), downplay or ignore the
crucial role that the Comité des Citoyens played in the
events of 1892 and in the African-American community of New
Orleans. In “We as Freemen,” Medley gives the educators,
businessmen, lawyers, writers and artisans who formed the Comité
their due, and in the process vividly recreates the New Orleans
society in which they lived.
Many of the Comité’s members were
descendants of free person’s of color, the celebrated class of
African-Americans who prospered in antebellum New Orleans
despite severe social and legal constraints. Many members of
this class, Medley notes, had “received European educations
and achieved prominence in science, music, literature, and
philosophy.”
After Appomattox, these men and women seized
the opportunity to claim full political, legal and social
equality. They helped lead the Reconstruction-era sit-ins that
integrated the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1868 that
granted suffrage to black men and integrated public schools and
juries. They also joined the Unification Movement of 1873 that
brought together ex-Confederates such as Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard
and black leaders such as editor Louis Roundenez, in a brief but
unsuccessful effort at racial cooperation. When the Comité
des Citoyens formed in 1891 to protest the Separate Car Act,
the sons of those Reconstruction-era leaders became the backbone
of the organization.
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As a result, Medley notes, the members of the
Comité “hardly represented a random sample of the
South’s black population. With many of mixed-race heritage,
fluent in French and English, Roman Catholic, professional
rather than laboring, they seemed more in tune with European
pursuits than in rural black life.” They were sons of a
privileged black class who had inherited their parents’
commitment to political activism. They rejected the
accommodationist ideas of Booker T. Washington and instead
launched “a last ditch, desperate effort” to retain the
rights their forbears had fought so hard to gain.
Photo left:
Rodolphe L. Desdunes |
Rather than stand by passively as Louisiana
state senator (and later) governor) Murphy J. Foster restored
white supremacy to the state, they went to work raising funds
and orchestrating legal challenges they hoped would discredit
the emerging Jim Crow order. Medley gives particular credit in
this effort to Louis Martinet, publisher of the Crusader, a
newspaper that became the voice of the Comité and was, for a
time, the only African-American daily in the country. In an era
when outspoken black leaders often feared for their lives,
martinet could be seen each day walking fearlessly to his French
Quarter office from his home on Burgundy Street, wearing “a
black suit, with a black bow string tie and a black felt wide
brim hat.”
Martinet refused to be cowed, and he scoffed
at suggestions that legal challenges like Plessy’s were too
risky because the courts might sanction Jim Crow laws rather
than overturn them. Such risks, Martinet and his legal writer
Rodolphe Desdunes believed, were worth taking. Without immediate
legal action the new segregation laws would soon become
“commonly accepted principles.”
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Medley argues that Martinet was the chief
legal tactician in the Plessy case. Most previous accounts have
focused on the efforts of Martinet’s friend and confidant
Albion Tourgee, the white lawyer who argued Plessy’s case
before the Supreme Court. Tourgee was the author of A
Fool’s Errand, a best-selling, semi-autobiographical
account of the Republican Party’s failed efforts to change the
hearts and minds of white Southerners during Reconstruction.
Photo right: Albion
Winegar Tourgee (b1838), Plessy lawyer before Supreme
Court |
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Although Medley acknowledges Tourgee’s
importance, he argues that martinet has been unjustly
overshadowed. “Tourgee is credited as the legal architect of
the Plessy case,” Medley writes, “but Martinet labored in
the trenches. He worked the legal system, obtained the local
lawyer to defend Plessy at the state level, planned the
mechanics of the test cases, and engaged the railroads to
cooperate in their efforts.”
The
Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was
ultimately a disaster for African-Americans, and today joins Dred
Scott v. Sandford as one of the court's most infamous
opinions. In We as Freemen, Medley provides a concise
discussion of Justice Henry Billings Brown's majority opinion in
Plessy, in which the Justice concluded that the Louisiana's
Separate Car Act did not violate the "equal
protection" clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment because it stipulated that railroads had to
provide "equal" facilities for the two races.
Although
Plessy's lawyers argued that the law stamped "the colored
race with a badge of inferiority," Justice Brown disagreed.
"If this be so," he wrote, "it is not by reason
of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored
race chooses to put that construction upon it." The defeat
was total. "For Tourgee, Plessy, and the Comité des
Citoyens," Medley notes, "the majority opinion
sounded a deafening, gavel-thumping finality that only a United
States Supreme Court decision could render."
What
solace Plessy and his supporters could find in the outcome came
in the lone dissenting opinion of Justice John Marshall Harlan.
"There is no caste here," Harlan wrote. "Our
constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates
classes among citizens. The thin disguise of 'equal
accommodations' for passengers in railroad coaches will not
mislead anyone nor atone for the wrong this day done."
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In
the years immediately following Plessy, Gov. Foster and
other segregationist politicians cited the court's
decision as their authority for passing laws that
segregated restrooms, water fountains and other public
facilities. Legislators installed poll taxes and
literacy tests that disenfranchised most of Louisiana's
black voters and removed them from jury rolls.
By
the late 1890s, Medley writes, "the philosophy of
white supremacy that once roamed the countryside found
expression in the statehouse." The era of Jim Crow
had arrived. It would be more than 50 years before Charles
Houston, Thurgood
Marshall and other civil rights lawyers could
convince the Justices of the Supreme Court that Plessy
and the Comité des Citoyens had been
right. |
Despite
a handful of jarring typographical and editorial errors that are
the fault of the press rather than the author, most readers will
find Medley's book thoughtful and enlightening. His arguments
are clear and persuasive, and he skillfully makes the Supreme
Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson secondary to the
valiant efforts of Plessy, Martinet, and the Comité des
Citoyens. He also enriches the book by highlighting historic
landmarks, grave sites, and houses from the Plessy era that
survive in the Tremé, Faubourg Marigny and Uptown.
After
reading
We as
Freeman: Plessy v. Freemen many readers will share Medley's
lament that Homer Plessy's name is today often "wrongly
associated with the existence of Jim Crow laws rather than an
early legal, social, and moral movement to end them."
___________
Source: Times-Picayune (Sunday, 25 May 2003);
Michael Ross
is a professor of history at Loyola University
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Homer Plessy was born on St. Patrick's Day
in 1863. His middle name on the birth record reflects
the patron saint of his natal day but later records show
his middle name as either Adolph or the French
equivalent, Adolphe, after his father. Homer's
grandfather, Germain Plessy, died the month after his
birth. . . .
Home Plessy died in 1925. His obituary was simple:
"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.
Source: We as Freemen, pp. 24; 218 |
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update 12
November 2008
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