In my own lifetime, on the surface at least, the United States of America has made great progress on race relations, yet there is obviously still far to go.
The racial pain of 2020, brought into focus following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, served as a further awakening of awareness about the built-in bias many people of color feel in America. A bias many white people, or people of elevated economic status, simply do not see, or refuse to acknowledge.
New Orleans is a city, that in many ways, serves as a living example of a community that is both inclusive and divided.
Near the confluence of Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico the population of modern day New Orleans traces roots to France, other European countries, Africa, the Caribbean, and points throughout the United States. The city is a mix of cultures, music, art, architecture and language influenced by all those places. Most everyone knows they are from somewhere else and have come together to form a community regardless of their differences.
This is not to say that the differences have gone unrecognized, or that they have not caused conflict, in the past or now.
Visiting New Orleans in early January, just after New Year, but before Mardi Gras, I came to the intersection of St. Claude Boulevard and Homer Plessy Way. Here I was reminded that as detached from real life as the U.S. Supreme Court may seem to most of us, the names contained in the titles of most of its cases represent real Americans, with real life concerns, who are seeking justice from the highest court in the land. And decisions of the court can effect us all for better or worse for decades depending on the outcome.
In June of 1892, the seventh to be exact, Homer Plessy, bought a first class train ticket from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana. His purpose was to challenge a law passed by the Louisiana legislature, two years earlier(the Separate Car Act), which required Black people to ride in separate train cars from white people.
Plessy was of mixed race and could easily pass for white, but when he took his seat in the whites only section of the train the conductor asked him if he was "colored." Plessy said, "Yes," and the conductor asked him to move to the colored car. Plessy refused and was arrested and taken off the train. He was bailed out of jail the next morning by the Citizens' Committee to Test the Separate Car Act. Plessy was a member.
In local court, Plessy's attorney argued that the Separate Car Act was a violation of both the 13th (anti-slavery) and 14th (Equal Protection) Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. He lost. He filed a suit against the judge, John Ferguson, and lost that appeal before the Louisiana Supreme Court. Plessy and his supporters then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that would be titled Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Four years after his arrest, the Supreme Court handed down its verdict in a near unanimous decision that is still seen as an embarrassment in the history of the court today.
Plessy vs. Ferguson established the doctrine of "separate but equal," which held that states had the right to require separate public accommodations for the races as long as those accommodations were of equal quality. Thirty years after the end of the Civil War, Plessy vs. Ferguson was the case that was seen as opening the door fully to new state laws(Jim Crow laws) meant to segregate the races. Some observers have said it went so far as to establish apartheid in the southern United States.
Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter. He argued there was no way to interpret the Constitution that could justify the separation of the races under the law. Harlan was once a slave owner.
Above: Scenes from the neighborhood where Plessy challenged the Separate Car Act.
After the high court ruling, Plessy returned to New Orleans and paid a $25 fine for refusing to sit in the "colored only" train car in 1892. He lived in New Orleans the rest of his life and stayed active in public affairs.
The doctrine of separate but equal stood until 1954 when the school segregation case known as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in theory, but not specifically, over-turned the Plessy decision. In that case, the majority ruled 'separate but equal' had no place in the American public school system. Brown vs. Board would serve as the foundation for efforts to end segregation in all public accommodations over the following decades.
But as is the case in most of human history, the Brown decision was not the end of the story and everyone did not live conflict free ever after. While New Orleans is a multi-cultural city, there are still economic divides that can be traced back to race relations.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killing nearly 2,000 with its Category Five winds and flooding. The storm hit Black sections of the city especially hard and many residents were left to fend for themselves without food and water - for days - as the rest of the country watched live coverage of the injustice on television.
Even today, fifteen years later, some sections of the city have not recovered. Whole neighborhoods are flattened and have not been re-built. If you didn't know about the storm, you might not understand the desolation. New Orleans, like many cities in the south and across the country, still struggles with the poverty, crime and other social injustices that begin with racial conflict.
In 2018, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-0 to rename a section of Press Street, Homer Plessy Way. According to the Times Picayune, Keith Plessy, the president of the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation said, "History ultimately sifts the heroes from the villains, though the process takes longer than one man or one woman’s lifetime."
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© Dean Pagani 2021
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© Dean Pagani 2021