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A light-skinned Creole, Homer Plessy was arrested and jailed in 1892 for sitting in a Louisiana railroad car designated for white people only. Plessy had violated the 1890 state law that called for racially segregated facilities. Plessy went to court, claiming the law violated the 13th and 14th amendments, but Judge Ferguson found him guilty anyhow. By 1896 the case had gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, who also found Plessy guilty by an 8-1 majority. The resulting doctrine of "separate but equal" institutionalized segregation in the United States until overturned in 1954 by the case of Brown v. Board of Education.   The Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court   W.E.B. Dubois

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Homer Plessy,

a creole of color and civil rights activist

, was born in New Orleans, La. in 1863. From Louisiana, Plessy was the second child of Adolphe Plessy and Rosa Debergue Plessy. His father died when he was five, and his mother rosa remarried shortly thereafter. Plessy was apprenticed as a shoemaker, the profession of his stepfather and maternal relatives. In 1887, he married Louise Bordenave at St. Augustine Church.

In 1892, Homer Plessy decided to challenge a two-year-old streetcar law that seperated passengers traveling on trains in Louisiana. His action made him a plaintiff and defendant in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896.

A group of influential creole American civic and business leaders, chose Homer Plessy to board the white car of the East Louisiana Railway leaving from New Orleans and traveling to Covington. The Citizen's Committee's strategy was to purposely break the Seperate Car law so the case could go before the state supreme court.

The case eventually made its way to the United States Supreme Court which eventually ruled against Plessy. The Supreme Court upheld the statute of "Seperate but Equal" and unfortunately this landmark decision eventually was used to justify segregation in education, public accomodations, and transportation.

After the case, Plessy drifted into anonymity, later becoming a life insurance collector with People's Life Insurance Company. Plessy died on March 1, 1925 and is buried in his mother's family tomb in St. Louis Cemetary.

Homer plessys' tomb at St. Louis cemetary 1