Aristide Mary’s politics embodied Creole activism in New Orleans. A native of the city, Mary’s mixed race ancestry shaped his experiences and political ideas. Educated in Paris, Mary became a lawyer but his family’s inheritance helped propel him into a wealthy businessman. The ideas he learned in France about law and society influenced Mary’s political devotion to racial equality and integration, making him a member of the radical Republican Party following the Civil War. In particular, Mary advocated for integration and funded lawsuits to protest racial segregation. This influence was felt throughout New Orleans as he held positions on the Straight University Board of Trustees and on the Executive Committee, and facilitated multiple movements to fight for civil rights. In 1873, Mary helped bring white and Black people in Louisiana together under the umbrella of unity to fight for equality and justice. During this period of racial violence and the denial of constitutional rights for Black Americans, Mary co-founded the biracial Unification Movement and rallied 1,800 Black and white men to sign their names to a document calling for racial equality. Exposition Hall housed the meetings, which sat on the 700 block of St. Charles Avenue. Within the Unification Movement, Mary served on the Committee of One Hundred and Committee of Resolutions to formulate the movement’s principles and resolutions calling for political justice, racial equality, and an end to discrimination. Composed of other highly respected New Orleans businessmen, including Paul Bonseigneur, Laurente Auguste, Eugene Luscy, and C. C. Antoine, these committees connected Creoles of color and gave them a platform for their activism. Although the Unification Movement was short-lived, Mary continued to exert his influence and finances toward racial harmony in New Orleans. A few years later in 1877, Mary led a large delegation of his followers to protest the reinstatement of segregated schools in New Orleans. They believed that segregated schools would lead to segregated public spaces and infringe on public rights to equality. Not giving up the fight, Mary helped establish the Crescent City Arthur Republican Central Club where he was an honorary member. These types of clubs were formed in every ward throughout New Orleans and Louisiana and were based on affirming the principles of republicanism within the Republican Party. In 1891, Mary again used his local influence and connections to help other Creole leaders, such as Rodolphe Desdunes and Louis Martinet, form the Comité des Citoyens (Citizen's Commitee). This organization of Black Creole activists planned to bring a legal challenge to segregation laws. Utilizing his finances, in addition to his experiences as a radical Republican and a leader of protests against school segregation, Mary helped Desdunes and Martinet devise a plan for Homer Plessy to board a train at the Press Street Station in New Orleans and contest the 1890 Separate Car Act. Tragedy struck the Mary family as well as the Comité when Mary died by suicide in 1893. The Creole community had lost a prominent figure who radically fought for civil rights in the post-Civil War era. Additionally, the founding father of the Comité had left them before their legal protest against segregation was resolved in court. Even though Mary did not live to see the Plessy v. Ferguson case through, his impact on civil rights survived.

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In the immediate aftermath of Plessy v. Ferguson, the case itself received relatively little attention. Homer Plessy paid the twenty-five dollar fine for violating the Separate Car Act and went to work as a laborer. Before the ruling, segregation was less formal in the public sphere, primarily felt in education. However, Plessy soon cemented segregation throughout United States society. This new legal regime, dubbed “Jim Crow,” entrenched racial segregation in public spaces such as transportation services, hotels, water fountains, parks, and restrooms, justified under the “separate but equal” doctrine of the case.  Following Plessy, racial discrimination played out in other facets of society in Louisiana as well. For example, the 1898 Louisiana Constitution disenfranchised thousands of Black voters through poll taxes and literacy tests. The increase in lynchings also continued to terrorize African Americans during the 1890s and into the twentieth century. Racial tensions erupted in New Orleans during the Robert Charles Race Massacre of 1900, in which white New Orleanians attacked Black citizens at random in their manhunt for Charles, a Black man accused of shooting local white police officers. Therefore, the U.S. entered a new century dedicated to maintaining white supremacy through violence, disenfranchisement, and segregation.  By the election of 1912, formal legal segregation had become law in the South. President Woodrow Wilson solidified this legal trend nationally and segregated the federal government via executive order. However, new resistance movements in the spirit of protest emerged in response. The Niagara Movement which later merged into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), continued the legacy of the Comité by fighting for Black civil rights through legal channels. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP’S Legal Defense Fund, successfully defeated the doctrine of separate but equal in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court ruled the segregation of public schools as unconstitutional, reversing the judicial decision in Plessy and paving the way to challenge formal legal segregation and discrimination in other public facilities.  The legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson continues to hold significance in the twenty-first century. In September of 2004, two descendants of John Ferguson and Homer Plessy met at the book signing hosted at the Preservation Resource Center for We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson, a detailed history of the people and events that led up to the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision. The author, Keith Weldon Medley, introduced Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, who soon formed a friendship and partnership around their shared history. Five years later on February 12, 2009, Keith and Phoebe joined the Crescent City Peace Alliance and NOCCA to unveil the Plessy v. Ferguson historical marker on the site of Plessy’s arrest in 1892 at the corner of Press and Royal Streets. On July 9, 2009, at Cafe Reconcile on Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., Keith and Phoebe formally incorporated the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation dedicated to educating students and the public about the complex history, surprising details, and civil rights activism of the case. In 2018, Press Street was renamed Homer Plessy Way in his honor. The Homer A. Plessy Community School, a K-8 school for New Orleans children, is also named for the historic plaintiff. Homer Plessy Day falls on June 7, the date of his arrest, and similarly memorializes Plessy and the fight for civil rights in New Orleans.  Most recently on January 5th, 2022, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards issued a pardon for Homer Plessy for violating the 1890 Separate Car Act. Descendants who signed the pardon application, including Keith and Phoebe, bore witness to Governor Edwards issuing the posthumous pardon in an important step toward restorative justice for Plessy and other victims of racially discriminatory laws. The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation’s efforts to preserve, make known, and memorialize the history of Plessy v. Ferguson help us reconcile with the past and fuels our commitment to justice and equity in New Orleans and nationwide.

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Caesar Carpentier Antoine was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 10, 1836, to a prominent Creole family. His family were part of an established network of Creoles of color in Louisiana that fought for public rights and equality. His father, Pedro Antoine, was a veteran of the Battle of New Orleans and his mother, Mary Gasso, was a native of the West Indies. His paternal grandmother, an enslaved woman of color, bought her freedom and made a living as a midwife. Antoine’s family history helps explain why he and his brother joined the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, a state militia unit formed of free men of color for the Confederate Army. As a Creole, Antoine enjoyed relative privilege and freedom in New Orleans, living similarly to his white counterparts, thus aligning some of his interests with those of white Southerners. However, when the Union Army occupied New Orleans early in the Civil War, Antoine joined these forces and recruited Black soldiers. He was forced to relinquish his status as an officer but continued to serve through the Union until the end of the war as a common soldier. After the Civil War, Antoine returned to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana and became involved in business and politics. In 1868, citizens of Caddo Parish elected Antoine to the state senate where he served on the biracial constitutional committee that crafted the Louisiana Constitution of 1868, the most radical document extending civil rights protections to formerly enslaved people and other people of color in the state. By 1872, Antoine ascended to his highest political distinction as lieutenant governor of Louisiana. He remained in this position until Democrats, the White League, and other white supremacists staged a coup to overthrow the election of 1876 and placed a Democratic governor in power. As a result, former Confederates and their allies began to reestablish white supremacist rule in the state government. The coup signified white Southerners’ response to Black political and social gains during Reconstruction, a period in which Black citizens exercised political influence and implemented civil rights laws. One year later, federal troops left their stations in 1877 and marked the end of Reconstruction, leaving Black Southerners without federal protections in the face of growing white supremacist rule.  Nonetheless, Antoine continued to be an influential activist in New Orleans, where he maintained a residence in the 300 block of South Claiborne Avenue, and worked alongside people of color and progressive white men and women to advocate for equal rights. He held leadership roles in the biracial Unification Movement alongside Aristide Mary and the American Equal Rights Association. In 1891, eighteen Creole of color members of these two groups formed the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens’ Committee) to fight against racial discrimination in courts, including Louis Martinet and Rodolphe Desdunes. Antoine’s experiences defending equal justice during Reconstruction inspired the group to elect him as the Comité’s Vice President. As a veteran voice, his influence was crucial to the organization’s protest of the Separate Car Act and the Plessy v. Ferguson case that eventually reached the Supreme Court.

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Born in New Orleans in 1849, Rodolphe Desdunes actively participated in the city’s Creole social and political scene, eventually co-founding the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens’ Committee) in 1891. As the son of Pierre Feremie Desdunes, of Haitian ancestry, and his Cuban mother Henriette, Desdunes lived as a free person of color. Their family made a living growing tobacco and making cigars. Desdunes turned to education and studied law at Straight University, a historically Black college, and taught at The Institut Catholique, educating African American orphans. Between 1879 and 1912, he intermittently worked at the United States Customs House at 423 Canal Street as a messenger and clerk. In addition, Desdunes served as a member of the state militia and fought at the three-day Battle of Liberty Place against the White League, made of five thousand paramilitary ex-Confederate soldiers from the Democratic Party. The White League overpowered the state militia and local police force and overran the State Capital in New Orleans to protest the 1872 governor’s election results. This was just ​​one of the many incidents of racial violence that characterized the Reconstruction era in Louisiana.Like many Black Americans of the time, Desdunes’s radical politics found a home in the Republican Party. Between jobs at the Customs House, Desdunes penned the political ideas of Black Creoles like himself. He wrote for two local Black newspapers, The Louisianian and The Crusader, and composed many articles meditating on ideas about public rights and equality, and called for civil rights for Black Americans and Black Creoles. At The Crusader, Desdunes, working closely with other Creoles of color such as Louis Martinet and Aristide Mary, and helped form the Comité that opposed racial separation and devised a legal strategy to challenge the Separate Car Act of 1890, which legally segregated passenger rail cars in Louisiana. In The Crusader, Desdunes explained the humiliating impact of the SCA: “Among the many schemes devised by Southern statement to divide the races, none is so audacious and insulting as the one which provides separate cars for black and white people on the railways running through the State. It is like a slap in the face of every member of the black race, whether he has the full measure or only one-eight of that blood,” he wrote in 1891.  The Comité concocted a plan with Rodolphe Desdunes’s eldest son Daniel to contest the law. In February of 1892, Daniel boarded a white rail car at the Pontchartrain Railroad Depot at the corner of Elysian Fields and Decatur Street, headed for Mobile, Alabama. Desdunes’s civil disobedience caused an immediate stir, and the train was stopped at the Louisville-Nashville line split just north of Claiborne Avenue on Elysian Fields, where Lowe’s Home Improvement is currently located. Daniel was removed from the train and arrested, which allowed the Comité to challenge the Separate Car Act (SCA) of 1890 in court. Local Judge John Ferguson acquitted Daniel Desdunes, ruling that the Separate Car Act could not be enforced since the train he boarded traveled into other states. The SCA only had jurisdiction over travel within Louisiana. Learning from this mistake, the train Homer Plessy boarded a few months later traveled within the state of Louisiana, thus setting the stage to challenge the Separate Car Act. Plessy v. Ferguson put the radical politics of Desdunes and his colleagues on the Comité into action, launching a national fight for civil rights in the 1890s.

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By the 1870s, steamboats carried passengers up and down the Mississippi River, docking in the ports of major cities like New Orleans. Here, in July 1872, Captain John Benson denied Josephine Decuir née Dubuclet entry into the women’s cabin on the steamer Governor Allen explicitly because she was a woman of color, and the women’s cabin was reserved white women only. She was also not allowed to take her meal at a table until all white passengers finished first. Madame Decuir sued Captain Benson for racial discrimination, joining a legacy of women of color who used litigation in the courts to gain rights denied to them during the Reconstruction era. Madame Decuir’s lawsuit against Captain Benson was the first legal case to challenge segregation after the Civil War. Madame Decuir spent the entirety of the American Civil War in France, living in a social environment where she was treated as equal to white women. She came from a family of Black Creoles who spoke French, enslaved others, and owned plantations. Her brother, Antoine Dubuclet, had political influence and served as the Louisiana State Treasurer after the Civil War. In 1866, when she returned home to Louisiana, Decuir boarded the main cabin of the Lafourche, but Captain Barranco denied her access, explaining that segregation was the custom on all steamships. Her prior experiences in France, pride in her family’s status, and Creole identity inspired her to affirm her right to equality. When Madame Decuir boarded the Governor Allen with her lawyers seven years later, she understood the power of them bearing witness to this practice of segregation that directly violated her rights guaranteed under the Louisiana State Constitution of 1868.  Decuir’s legal case began in the New Orleans courts and progressed to the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in 1877, at the end of Reconstruction. Her lawyers argued that Article 13 of Louisiana’s 1868 State Constitution as well as an 1869 statute afforded her equal access to all modes of transportation regardless of race. Madame Decuir never attended court, but her testimony demonstrated a level of intent equal to other women of color who did. Thirty-one women of color, like Madame Decuir, challenged segregation on common carriers from 1855-1914. Decuir relied on her gender and social class to demonstrate that she was a well-respected woman and therefore deserved access to the women’s cabin. At the local courts, other steamship captains testified as witnesses on behalf of Captain Benson to affirm the practice of segregation. In response, Decuir’s case called upon Creole men of color to describe the conditions of the segregated ships. After these testimonies, the judge awarded Decuir $1,000 in damages at which point Captain Benson appealed to the State Supreme Court which upheld the local decision. As a result, Captain Benson’s lawyers requested that SCOTUS add this case to the docket. By the time the case reached SCOTUS, the dynamics had changed. First, Captain Benson died and his widow, Eliza Jane Hall, became the administrator. As a white woman, she represented the institution of segregation that justified racial separation for the protection of white women. The court was more concerned with Decuir’s race than her gender. Additionally, R.H. Marr, a staunch white supremacist who defended the Colfax Massacre and instigated the Battle of Liberty Place, joined as co-counsel for the defense. In Hall v. Decuir (1877), the Supreme Court overturned the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling. Even though Decuir’s stint on the Governor Allen remained within the state of Louisiana, the court made a decision on intrastate affairs--because the boat traveled to other states after Decuir disembarked--fell under the jurisdiction of Congress. Therefore, Louisiana’s civil rights laws protecting Black citizens from racial segregation were nullified by federal powers. This ruling demonstrates how SCOTUS intentionally dismantled Black citizenship rights and rolled back federal protections. Hall v. Decuir set the stage for the doctrine of separate but equal by nullifying civil rights laws against segregation. As a Creole woman of color, Decuir’s protest against racially discriminatory practices foreshadowed the arguments of the Comité des Citoyens. Years before the Comité, she fought for public rights to guarantee her dignity and status. Justice Harlan also cited the Hall v. Decuir ruling in his lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. Hall v. Decuir demonstrates how Black women like Decuir were a part of the legacy of defying and challenging the practice of segregation and their involvement in racial justice movements.

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