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

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.

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.”

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

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."

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."

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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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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 200 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."

In addition, articles by Medley on the case appeared in Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Times-Picayune, and as a cover story in The New Orleans Tribune. His Smithsonian magazine article on the case has been reprinted in a number of textbooks and resource guides including Conflict, Confidence, and Power edited by Mary Framer-Kaiser; The Way We Lived: Essays and Documents in American Social History by Frederick M. Binder and David M. Reimers; Readings for U.S. History by Dr. Michael A. White; and the 1994 Social Issues Research Series. As a photographer, Medley's work has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, American Legacy, The New Orleans Tribune, and the front cover of Callaloo #20, and also the front cover of In These Houses by Brenda Marie Osbey. He has also contributed photographs to American Poetry Review and Welcome! A Guide for Black Tourists in new Orleans. Medley's photographs are also part of the New Orleans Public Library's regional photographers collection. Medley is a member of the Friends of New Orleans Cemeteries, Preservation Resource Center, Friends of the Amistad Research Center, and Friends of Bishop Perry Middle School. Photo above right: Mardi Gras Indian (source: cover of American Legacy, Summer 2000)

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update 12 November 2008