Nearly 130 years after Homer Plessy was charged with sitting in the “all-white” train car, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards posthumously pardoned him Wednesday.
The ceremony took place at a school near the spot where Plessy, a Creole man of mostly white descent, was arrested for refusing to leave a train carriage that only catered to people of fully white ancestry. The case made its way to the Supreme Court in 1896, when the majority ruled against Plessy, legalizing segregation so long as facilities were “separate but equal.”
Edwards said the ceremony was “a great way to kick off the new year in Louisiana and in the country.”
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“While this pardon has been a long time coming, we can all acknowledge that this is a day that should have never had to happen,” he said.
Descendants of both parties in the case gave remarks about the symbolic progress of the pardon.
“I feel like my feet are not touching the ground today,” said Keith Plessy, Homer Plessy’s first cousin three times removed, describing his happiness that his ancestor’s heroism was recognized.
“This wrongful conviction has brought us here today. Not to erase what happened 125 years ago, but to acknowledge the wrong that was done and to reaffirm our pledge to do whatever is within our power to prevent such wrongs in the future,” said Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great-granddaughter of Judge John Howard Ferguson, who initially heard the case.
Louisiana’s pardon board recommended in November that Plessy be posthumously pardoned. He died in 1925 with the conviction on his record, having paid a $25 fine.
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Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown authored the majority opinion, saying that while the 14th Amendment promised equality between races, “in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a co-mingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to the either.”
The “separate but equal” doctrine was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
