BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

Louisiana Guv Pardons Plessy of ‘Separate but Equal’ Ruling 129 Years Later

Plessy was arrested in 1892 after a deliberate act of civil disobedience in Louisiana, refusing to leave a “whites-only” train car.

Louisiana’s governor has issued a posthumous pardon to the man whose pioneering act of civil disobedience led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in the subsequent Plessy v. Ferguson case. Standing outside the New Orleans train station where Homer Plessy, a Black man, boarded a “whites-only” train car in 1892 and refused to leave, Gov. John Bel Edwards called the pardon “a step in the right direction.” But, he acknowledged, “the stroke of my pen on this pardon, while momentous, it doesn’t erase generations of pain and discrimination. It doesn’t eradicate all the wrongs wrought by the Plessy court, or fix all of our present challenges.” In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in favor of Louisiana’s “separate but equal” policy, enshrining it until 1954, when it was overruled in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Plessy died in 1925. One of his descendants spoke at Wednesday’s news conference. Kevin Plessy, Homer Plessy’s first cousin three generations removed, said that he felt like “my feet are not touching the ground, because my ancestors are carrying me.”