Homer Plessy receives pardon 130 years later

13th December 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson are the unlikeliest of friends, especially given that their ancestors were anything but comrades.

In 1892, Orleans Parish Criminal District Court judge John Howard Ferguson oversaw the case of Homer Plessy. With Plessy’s conviction for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890, which established segregated seating on passenger trains, his historical fate was sealed.

But when Plessy, a Black Creole man, was found guilty of refusing to leave a whites-only East Louisiana Railroad train car at the Press Street Depot – today the site is located in what is now the Bywater neighborhood – the fates of millions of African Americans in the Jim Crow South were cast in stone as well.

Homer Plessy appealed the case, which ended up going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896, when the highest court of the land upheld Plessy’s guilty plea with its infamous “separate but equal” doctrine, which codified segregation legally and, in effect, doomed generations of Black Americans to second-class status.

But now, Keith, Homer Plessy’s great-great-first cousin, and Phoebe, Judge Ferguson’s great-great-grand-daughter, joined together on a mission to wipe Homer Plessy’s criminal slate clean – and place on display the type of social, racial and emotional reconciliation that has taken place since 1954, when the Supreme Court finally overturned Plessy v. Ferguson with the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that struck down Jim Crow laws as unconstitutional.

Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson’s drive to right a terrible, devastating wrong came to full fruition last month, when they appeared before the Louisiana Pardon Board to ask the board to extend a pardon to Homer Plessy for his conviction in 1890. The board swiftly agreed with the pair and voted unanimously on Nov. 12 to pardon Homer Plessy.

The descendants of the central figures in the original 1890 case said the work and time they put into receiving a pardon for Homer Plessy was more than worth it to absolve Homer Plessy and, however symbolically, reframe a dark portion of our country’s past.

“In the 11 years we’ve been trying to tell the truth about this case, we’ve used [the pardon in the case] as a conduit to free Homer Plessy from the shackles of injustice,” Phoebe Ferguson said.

Keith Plessy placed their crusade for justice in further historical context, pointing out that Homer Plessy was actually carefully selected by late-19th-century civil rights advocates to test the state’s segregation laws of that era.

The New Orleans organization called the Comite de Citoyens, or Committee of Citizens – a multi-ethnic group of activists dedicated to fighting the 1890 Separate Car Act – chose Plessy, a mixed-race Creole, to test the law by getting arrested and placing the matter in the courts.

Once in court, Plessy’s attorneys argued that the Separate Car Act, and as such Plessy’s arrest, violated his Constitutional rights under the 13th and 14th Amendments, an argument the court rejected with his conviction.

“I feel that working together, we have been trying to tell the whole story of the Citizens Committee and the Civil Rights Movement that continued after this case,” Keith Plessy said. “[The Plessy strategy] was the blueprint that was used over and over again [by Civil Rights advocates] in the 20th century.”

“New Orleans,” he added, “was the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement.”

The pardon is now before Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose signature on the document will make the pardon official. When contacted by The Louisiana Weekly, Shauna Sanford, the governor’s communications director, referred the paper to comments Edwards made on the latter’s radio show last month.

On the show, Edwards said he will definitely sign the pardon, adding that he hopes to underscore how significant Plessy’s pardon is.

“It will come to me at some point in the near future for my signature, and certainly I’m going to sign it, but we’re looking for an appropriate way to do this,” Edwards said. “This is so historically significant, and there are family members of both Homer Plessy and Ferguson in the New Orleans area, so we’re going to try to set that up just as soon as we possibly can.

“But I didn’t want this to be a signature that I just provided sitting at my desk without all these people being able to participate and us drawing proper attention to just how significant this is to take away that conviction for something that obviously never ever should have been a crime,” he added.

The pardon was possible because of the 2006 Avery C. Alexander Act, a state law authored by state Sen. Edwin Murray that provides a remedy for early civil rights activists whose records are still stained by convictions for violating unjust Jim Crow laws. Alexander was a civil rights pioneer, minister and state legislator who passed away in 1999.

Joining the descendants in supporting the pardon was Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, who also spoke enthusiastically at the Pardon Board hearing. He said Plessy’s conviction was an example of how unjust laws were wielded by the white-dominated society to oppress people of color under cover of the legal system.

“Mr. Plessy by law was guilty at that time of breaking the law,” Williams said, “by there’s equally no doubt that such an act [the Separate Car dictum] should not have been enacted to begin with.” That’s why Williams said he was grateful that Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson took up the fight to reverse an injustice that was all too symbolic of the centuries of oppression.

“The fact that their work has led us to the opportunity to correct a wrong and exonerate an innocent man who took a stand against injustice. I feel blessed to know Phoebe and Keith.”

Williams echoed Keith Plessy’s thoughts about the crucial place New Orleans has in the nascent Civil Rights Movement thanks to Homer Plessy, who died in 1925. (John Howard Ferguson died in 1915.)

Williams noted that the site of Plessy’s arrest more than 130 years ago at what was then the Press Street Depot at the intersection of Royal and Press Streets – which has since been renamed Homer Plessy Way and a historical marker now stands at the intersection – gets overlooked by many local residents.

“Most folks will go past those railroad tracks hundreds of times not knowing about the shadow of Jim Crow since the 1890s and not knowing what happened there, right there in our hometown,” he said.

During a November 30 visit to New Orleans, French Ambassador Phillipe Etienne visited the site to plant a tree in honor of Homer Plessy and his legacy.

“It was very moving and very meaningful,” Etienne said in an interview with The Louisiana Weekly. “Being there with the descendants of the two families, Plessy and Ferguson, and with all the people who contributed to this incredible story of bringing Homer Plessy and what he has done for civil rights and fighting against discrimination back to the light was really very important and also very moving for me, because it’s a common challenge.

“The defense of human rights and civil rights and the fight against discrimination and racism is something we must continue to do through such actions but also through everything we can do.” Etienne said that because the challenges remain, it’s important for people to rise up to the level of Plessy in order to combat racism.

The pardon, while certainly significant, isn’t a complete exoneration of Homer Plessy, noted Dr. Sharlene Sinegal-Decuir, the head of the history department at Xavier University of Louisiana.

“It pardons the convicted party but does not absolve the crime from ever happening,” she said.

Sinegal-Decuir said that ideally, Plessy should have been fully exonerated, which would wipe away his conviction altogether, as opposed to a symbolic pardon.

“If I must play devil’s advocate, Homer Plessy should not have been pardoned, he should have been exonerated and the family given an apology,” she said. “The whole concept of a pardon is to excuse an action because of the rehabilitation of the convict…are they saying that 96 years after his death Plessy is rehabbed?”

However, she added, the pardon absolutely does carry historical and social weight.

“The pardon means that in 2021, we as Americans can look at our racial past and admit that our way of thinking when the decision as rendered in 1896 was wrong,” she said. “The pardon shows that local, Louisiana government is accepting and validating its part in creating the system of legal separation of the races in the United States.”

Sinegal-Decuir added that progress, however, must continue. “New Orleans and the nation have come far but not far enough since the original Supreme Court ruling in 1896,” she said. “America has made painful strides to try and undo its rigid racial past, but these strides did not come without a cost to the African-American community.

“Despite laws being written to end racial strife like those that came out of the Civil Rights Movement,” she added, “African Americans are still fighting to have those laws enforced and to ensure that our 14th Amendment rights are protected. The African-American community has not yet seen full equality and social justice. If those things were truly achieved, America would not have the social movements it has today, particularly the Black Lives Matter Movement.”

Phoebe Ferguson, while jubilant of Homer Plessy’s pardon, also sounded a measure of cautious optimism, saying that with so much injustice and threats to individual rights – such as restrictive voting laws, the shrinking of reproductive rights, and the ongoing killing of Black women by law enforcement – much work still needs to be done.

“With all those laws being passed all over the country, we are not out of the woods with other forms of oppression,” she said.

However, Ferguson added, the Plessy pardon is definitely a sign of progress.

“When the governor officially signs the pardon, we’ll show that our state can show growth,” she said. She added that healing can advance when Louisiana “can say out loud and publicly that we were wrong.”

The Louisiana Weekly associate editor David T. Baker contributed to this story.

This article originally published in the December 13, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.