Constitutional Faces: Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, Descendants of Plessy v. Ferguson Litigants, Unite

June 5th, 2011

( Ted Jackson / TIMES-PICAYUNE ) - Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson stand on the tracks in New Orleans at Royal and Press streets, where Homer Plessy was arrested on June 7, 1892.

From WaPo:

When Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson decided to start a new civil rights education organization that would bear their famous names, they sealed the deal in a fitting local spot: Cafe Reconcile.

They represent the opposing principals in one of the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions,Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stood from 1896 until the court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

The descendent of the man who tested Louisiana’s law requiring separate railroad cars for whites and blacks and the great-great-granddaughter of the judge who upheld it met in 2004.

So the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation was born, and on Tuesday it will celebrate another anniversary of Homer Adolph Plessy’s decision to buy a railroad ticket for the June 7, 1892, train trip from New Orleans to Covington, on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain.

The organization seeks to highlight the historic moments in New Orleans’s struggle for racial equality and hopes to remind the public of the story behind the famous case. It was, Plessy and Ferguson said, a forerunner of the legal strategies and civil disobedience that took root in the civil rights struggles of the 20th century.

I gathered some more pics about Plessy v. Ferguson in this album.