The Kitchen Sisters Present

125 years after being convicted for sitting down in a whites-only train car, the Louisiana Board of Pardons has voted to clear the record of Homer Plessy. In 1896 his landmark case, Plessy v. Ferguson, went before the Supreme Court which ruled to uphold “separate but equal” racial segregation which remained in effect until 1954. In June 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizens Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impose segregation as the reforms made after the Civil War began to dissolve. The Citizens Committee recruited Homer Plessy, a light skinned black man, to board a train and get arrested in order to push the case to the Supreme Court in hopes of a decision that would uphold equal rights. Homer’s case was defeated 7 to 1. The case sharply div