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Homer Plessy, man whose arrest led to "separate but equal," is pardoned
Hat tip, Thursday's Washington Post, I think. Maybe it was The Wall Street Journal.
Man whose arrest led to ‘separate but equal’ is pardoned
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY
January 5, 2022
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana’s governor on Wednesday posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest for refusing to leave a whites-only railroad car in 1892 led to the Supreme Court ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into U.S. law for half a century. ... The state Board of Pardons last year recommended the pardon for Plessy, who boarded the rail car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn a state law segregating trains. Instead, the protest led to the 1896 ruling known as Plessy v. Ferguson, which solidified whites-only spaces in public accommodations such as transportation, hotels and schools for decades.
At a ceremony held near the spot where Plessy was arrested, Gov. John Bel Edwards said he was “beyond grateful” to help restore Plessy’s “legacy of the rightness of his cause … undefiled by the wrongness of his conviction.”
{snip}
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote in the 7-1 decision: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.” ... Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only dissenting voice, writing that he believed the ruling “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case” — an 1857 decision that said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen.
{snip}
The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling allowing racial segregation across American life stood as the law of the land until the Supreme Court unanimously overruled it in 1954, in Brown v. the Board of Education. Both cases argued that segregation laws violated the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection.
{snip}
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY
January 5, 2022
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana’s governor on Wednesday posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest for refusing to leave a whites-only railroad car in 1892 led to the Supreme Court ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into U.S. law for half a century. ... The state Board of Pardons last year recommended the pardon for Plessy, who boarded the rail car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn a state law segregating trains. Instead, the protest led to the 1896 ruling known as Plessy v. Ferguson, which solidified whites-only spaces in public accommodations such as transportation, hotels and schools for decades.
At a ceremony held near the spot where Plessy was arrested, Gov. John Bel Edwards said he was “beyond grateful” to help restore Plessy’s “legacy of the rightness of his cause … undefiled by the wrongness of his conviction.”
{snip}
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote in the 7-1 decision: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.” ... Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only dissenting voice, writing that he believed the ruling “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case” — an 1857 decision that said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen.
{snip}
The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling allowing racial segregation across American life stood as the law of the land until the Supreme Court unanimously overruled it in 1954, in Brown v. the Board of Education. Both cases argued that segregation laws violated the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection.
{snip}