Plessy V. Ferguson

A Legal Challenge to Segregation

The arrest of Homer Adoph Plessy (1862–1925) on June 7, 1892 was part of a planned challenge to the constitutionality of the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act by the Citizens’Committee, a small group of black professionals in New Orleans. The committee hired the [Page 400]white lawyer and novelist Albion Winegar Tourgée, who had begun calling attention to separate-car laws in his newspaper column in August of 1891. After the committee successfully led a test case in State v. Desdunes, in which the Louisiana district court declared forced segregation in railroad cars traveling between states to be unconstitutional, the committee was anxious for a case to test the constitutionality of segregation on railroad cars operating solely within a single state. Part of Tourgée's strategy was to have someone of mixed blood violate the law, since to do so would allow him to question the arbitrariness by which people were classified “colored.” Plessy, a Louisiana Creole of Haitian descent who was a mix of seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, agreed to be the test case.

The committee arranged with the railroad conductor and with a private detective to detain Plessy until he was arrested. This challenge received some silent support from railroad companies, which did not like the added expense of providing separate cars. A month after his arrest, Plessy came before a Louisiana district court presided over by Justice John Howard Ferguson. A native of Massachusetts, Ferguson had ruled earlier in the States v. Desdunes case that the separate car act was unconstitutional on interstate trains because of the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce. When Plessy appeared before the Louisiana district court, the court ruled that a state had the constitutional power to regulate railroad companies operating solely within its borders and concluded that the Louisiana Separate Car Act was indeed constitutional. The decision was appealed to the state supreme court in 1893 and was appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896.

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