“To Test the Infernal Law”: News Article on the Challenge to Jim Crow Trains

Background: Louis André Martinet, an Afro-Creole politician, attorney, and journalist founded the New Orleans Crusader in 1889. The newspaper covered local and national issues focusing on racial injustice, inequality, and segregation. The poet, historian, journalist, and civil rights activist Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes wrote for the newspaper and with Martinet organized the Citizens' Committee to resist Louisiana’s Separate Car Act.

Beset by such discouragements at the very outset, the Committee, actuated by a high motive and firm in purpose, preserved on the line mapped out, and in a short time had ,000.00 in its treasury to test the infernal law and defend the cause of equal rights, and was assured of its ability to raise as much more as might be necessary to bring matters to a satisfactory solution. And to-day its labors are crowned with glorious success. 

The right of the citizens to travel through the State is established. The Committee has also during that time thrown by the wayside a proposed law to foster prostitution, called anti-miscegenation law. Its next case is to test the right of the citizen to travel IN State. To that end it has undertaken the defense of Mr. H. A. Plessy, charged with violating the separate car law on the East Louisiana R. R., on his way to Covington. Mr. Plessy’s assertion of his right to travel for his money is as praiseworthy as the part acted by Mr. Desdunes, and equally with he is entitled to the gratitude of the people for the patriotic stand taken.

The favorable termination of this suit is not as clear as the other; but if the Committee fail, which it does not believe, it will no doubt go into the adjoining States and defeat the law there, or assist citizens of those States to do it, so as to drive the Jim Crow car out of the South entirely.

The Committee has raised the standard of equal rights and it will not lay it down until the principle enunciated in the immortal Declaration of Independence of the Fathers that “all men are created free and equal” becomes the law of the land.

Source: New Orleans Crusader, July 16, 1892.