Homer Plessy's Staged Arrest: The Railroad Ally and Harlan's Lone Dissent

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In June 1892 Homer Plessy, a free-born New Orleans shoemaker classified as an octoroon, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad, sat in the whites-only car and told the conductor about his ancestry. The confrontation was engineered by the Committee of Citizens, a coalition of Black citizens, Creoles of color and white allies formed to challenge Louisiana's 1890 Separate Car Act, which carried a $25 fine or up to 20 days in jail. The railroad cooperated because separate cars were costly, and the committee hired a private detective with arrest powers so the charge would cite the Separate Car Act itself. Judge John Howard Ferguson ruled the state could regulate an intrastate railroad under its police power, and the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld him, citing the 1849 Massachusetts case Roberts v. City of Boston.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, attorney Albion Tourgee argued that a reputation as white was a form of property the state was taking without due process, while Louisiana's attorney general Milton Joseph Cunningham defended segregation as social order. On May 18, 1896, the Court ruled 7 to 1 against Plessy in an opinion by Henry Billings Brown that rejected the 13th Amendment claim and set out separate but equal. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone and predicted the ruling would prove as pernicious as Dred Scott. Plessy pleaded guilty in 1897, paid the fine and died in 1925, before Brown v. Board in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• Brown's opinion said any badge of inferiority came only from how Black citizens chose to interpret the law.
• Harlan pointed to the law's exemption for Black nurses caring for white children as proof it enforced hierarchy, not separation.
• The Committee of Citizens disbanded shortly after the final loss.
• In 2009 descendants Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson met and founded the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation.
• In early 2022 the governor of Louisiana signed a posthumous pardon clearing Plessy's record.