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The state Board of Pardons in November recommended the pardon for Homer 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, solidifying whites-only spaces in public accommodations such as transportation, hotels and schools for decades.
Plessy was arrested trying to board a "whites-only" train car. The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson ushered in an era of laws that kept schools, housing and other venues segregated.
Keith Plessy, whose great-great-grandfather was Plessy’s cousin, called the event “truly a blessed day for our ancestors … and for children not yet born.”
Louisiana’s governor pardoned the Black man whose 1892 arrest for refusing to leave an all-white railroad car led to the ruling that cemented “separate but equal”
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana's governor planned to posthumously pardon Homer Plessy on Wednesday, more than a century after the Black man was arrested in