Plessy's Streetcar: The Test Case They Planned

Homer Plessy was a shoemaker. He was of mixed African and European descent, and to most people who looked at him on the street of New Orleans in eighteen ninety-two, he appeared white. That appearance was the point.

On June seventh of that year, Plessy walked to the Press Street station of the East Louisiana Railroad and boarded the whites-only car. When a conductor challenged him, he identified himself as a man of color and refused to move. He was arrested, as planned.

The arrest was planned. The Comité des Citoyens, a New Orleans organization composed of free Creoles of color, had spent months organizing the test case. They had chosen Plessy deliberately, in part because his appearance would make the absurdity of Louisiana's Separate Car Act most visible. They had even notified the railroad in advance, because they needed Plessy to be arrested rather than simply thrown off the train and ignored. The railroad, for its part, found the law an administrative nuisance and was not entirely reluctant to see it challenged. Everyone in the scene knew their role.

What no one could control was what the Supreme Court would do. In eighteen ninety-six, four years after the arrest, the court ruled against Plessy seven to one. Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky, wrote the lone dissent, arguing that the Constitution is color-blind. The majority established what it called the separate but equal doctrine, holding that legally enforced racial separation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the separate facilities were nominally equivalent.

That doctrine governed American law for fifty-eight years. It was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in nineteen fifty-four. The Comité des Citoyens lost the case. They had not lost sight of why they brought it. The historical marker stands a few blocks from here, near the original railroad crossing on Press and Royal Streets.