A closer look

Local Struggles and Plessy v. Ferguson

How can ordinary citizens influence Supreme Court decisions?

by Pennee Bender, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Louisiana’s Diverse Communities of Color

Every history textbook includes information on Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark 1896 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation laws that persisted in the United States until the 1960s. What most people don't know, however, is that decades of activism by people of color in Louisiana preceded this famous case, representing sustained struggles to achieve racial justice and equality in many spheres of life, not just on the segregated train car in which Homer Plessy attempted to sit.

The populations of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes of Louisiana included diverse communities of color made up of French Creoles, Haitian and Cuban exiles, free persons of color who had not been enslaved, and after 1865 a significant population of freed formerly enslaved men and women of African descent. During Reconstruction and into the 1890s, these communities of color established grassroots organizations and worked together with white Republican supporters and the Knights of Labor (a nationwide, multiracial labor union) to achieve equality. At Louisiana’s 1867–1868 Constitutional Convention, a multiracial plurality of delegates explicitly called for equality in civil, political, and public rights and access to public spaces.

Continued Black Activism after Reconstruction

But the end of national Reconstruction threatened the political rights of Black elected officials and their supporters in Louisiana. In 1879, white voters overwhelmingly ratified a new state constitution that eliminated all guarantees of equal civil, political, and public rights for African Americans. In the next decade, white voters forced men of color out of most public offices. Despite these reversals, in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, people of color and their allies looked beyond electoral politics to continue their fight for equality in labor, education, and public life. The Knights of Labor organized African American workers and sugarcane workers across the region. In 1887, more than ten thousand Black sugarcane workers led by the Knights went on strike. By refusing to work for more than three weeks at the height of harvest season, they pressured plantation owners and manufacturers to pay attention to their call for higher wages. The striking field workers built an alliance with townspeople that brought Black activists into public and political prominence. In response, White Leaguers, a racist paramilitary organization, mobilized vigilantes who attacked and killed at least thirty-five strikers in rural Thibodaux, Louisiana.

Across Louisiana, African Americans and Afro-Creoles tried to halt such attempts to repress and terrorize Black workers and other efforts to segregate public spaces and limit voting rights. The Afro-Creole and the African American communities in New Orleans viewed themselves as distinct groups with different interests, organizations, and leaders, but the onslaught of segregationist laws encouraged them to work together. The Afro-Creole community, under the leadership of Louis Martinet and Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, founded the weekly newspaper the Crusader to rally for equal rights. At the same time, the Methodist Episcopal Church, composed largely of the non-Creole Black middle class, began publishing the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a weekly newspaper, and helped create the American Citizens Equal Rights Association (ACERA). These new organizations immediately responded in 1890 when the Louisiana state legislature proposed the Separate Car Act, which would require all Louisiana railroad cars to have “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.”

Community Organizations Mount a Legal Campaign Against Segregation

ACERA organized a legislative lobbying campaign and petitions to block passage of the Separate Car Act. [document 3] Despite the efforts of both communities to halt its passage, the state legislature passed the Separate Car Act in July 1890. With this defeat, ACERA membership and activities declined and the Afro-Creole community in New Orleans shifted to efforts to overturn the law. Opponents of the law saw the struggle as having significance far beyond integrated trains; they feared the extension of segregation across every aspect of society. They created a Citizens’ Committee to launch a legal battle and raised funds from unions, benevolent societies, Masons, and civic groups, as well as individuals. The Citizens’ Committee was led by middle-class Afro-Creoles and revealed some of the class divisions within the Black community. Middle-class Afro-Creoles sought access to all aspects of New Orleans society, while many Black working-class New Orleans residents prioritized access to improved education, work, and housing, even if it remained segregated. The Committee raised funds to hire a prominent white Republican lawyer, Albion Tourgée. Tourgée proposed to challenge the law with a test case, to find someone willing to be arrested for violating the Separate Car Act by sitting in an area designated “for whites.” The Committee selected Daniel Desdunes, an Afro-Creole who could pass for white in order to highlight the difficulties in defining race. The first test case succeeded when the judge determined that the law did not apply to trains traveling out of state. [document 4] The Committee then arranged for a second arrest, in order to test the law for travel within the state of Louisiana. In June 1892, Homer Plessy—a light-skinned, working-class, Afro-Creole activist—volunteered to purchase a first-class ticket, declare himself as “colored,” and refuse to move to the “colored car.”

After Plessy’s arrest, arraignment, and conviction by local and state courts, the legal team appealed the case to the Supreme Court. In 1895, Plessy’s lawyers argued before the Supreme Court of the United States that the Separate Car Act was unconstitutional based on several points. First, they argued that segregated railroad cars reaffirmed racial divisions that were defined by slavery and constituted a key aspect of slavery. By re-creating these racial divisions, the Separate Car law violated Plessy’s rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments (which made slavery illegal and conferred citizenship rights to formerly enslaved men). In addition, by allowing railroad companies to determine the race of individuals, the law violated the second part of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which asserted that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens . . . nor . . . deprive any person of life, liberty or property.” Whiteness, or the reputation of belonging to the white race, was a form of property, they contended; separate cars denied Plessy the ability to determine his own race and thus denied him the privileges of this form of property.

On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court decided against Plessy and upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” accommodations. The lone dissenting vote by Justice John Marshall Harlan denounced the ruling and stated: “We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law.” The legal case that New Orleans activists hoped would reaffirm African American citizenship and equal rights, instead became a Supreme Court endorsement of segregationist policies with long-term ramifications.

Reflection Questions

All these sources and much of what we know of the community-based efforts to fight Jim Crow in New Orleans in the 1880s and 1890s comes from newspapers. Why might that be the case? What other types of documents might be useful to understand this story?

How did African American and progressive newspapers in New Orleans support struggles for equality?

How did laborers, middle-class African Americans, and white Republicans in Louisiana work together in the 1880s and 1890s? What were some areas of difference?

What role did the racial and ethnic diversity of New Orleans play in the region’s struggles for freedom and equality?

Years after the defeat of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, Rodolphe Desdunes wrote that he did not regret the effort because it was “more noble and worthy to fight than to show oneself passive and resigned. Absolute submission increases the oppressor’s power and creates doubts about the sentiments of the oppressed.” Given the long-lasting damage of the Plessy ruling, do you agree with Desdunes?

Additional Reading

Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

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