Homer Plessy is often remembered as a shoemaker — but he was also an activist. Born into a French-speaking Creole family, Plessy was a member of the Comité des Citoyens, a civil rights organization of Louisianans working to challenge segregation both inside and outside the courtroom.
Mack says the Comité employed tactics that would be echoed by later civil rights activists, using a three-pronged strategy that included direct action, publicity campaigns, and litigation. “There’s a remarkable degree of continuity between the activists who brought the Plessy case and what the civil rights movement of the 20th century will do,” he says.
The Comité started with protest. “When the Separate Car Act first passed, they boycott first,” says Mack. “There will later be boycotts of segregated facilities and against segregation laws, all through the 20th century, culminating in the Montgomery bus boycott, when they came to national prominence. It’s very significant that one of the first things they did in this case was to try to launch a boycott.”
When that did not work, the Comité meticulously planned the details of Plessy’s fateful encounter that hot June day on the train to ensure that he would be arrested and charged — and that the world would hear about it. In fact, both the train conductor, and the on-board detective who arrested Plessy, were key players in the organization’s plan to challenge the law. Through newsletters, they would publicize the unjustness of Plessy’s arrest and of the segregation law itself.
And once in court, Plessy’s attorneys tried a variety of arguments that would be also be used by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in the early- and mid-20th century, says Mack. “The activists in New Orleans who mounted Plessy as a test case were explicitly thinking about the federal courts, because they understood that the state courts in Louisiana were not going to help them.”
Before the Civil War, citizenship rights were defined at the state level, but the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments created new national protections, adds Mack. “What the Plessy lawyers, and the organizations that supported them, did was to first make the case that the 13th and 14th Amendments changed things and created new and quite vigorous national civil rights that redefined citizenship.”
While segregationists argued that that the mandates of the 13th and 14th Amendments were narrow — eliminate explicit slavery, prohibit only the most egregious and admitted discrimination against African Americans by state actors — Plessy and the Comité pushed for a broader interpretation, Mack says.
“Their claim was straightforward: that everyone knows why Louisiana enacted this segregation law,” he says. “It’s to keep Black people down, to say to them that they’re inferior, to make it so that white people don’t have to associate with Black people, and to do it through the law. Plessy’s claim was about the intention behind the law, that the intention was discriminatory, and that that was exactly the kind of thing that the 14th and even the 13th Amendments had been framed and ratified to prevent.”
Mack argues that this idea about intentionality — that segregation laws were passed primarily to disparage and humiliate Black people — was radical, and while it did not disappear in later civil rights cases, it tended to be strategically muted in favor of arguments that separate accommodations were not in fact “equal.”
“As is widely known, in the Brown decision itself the Court went out of its way not to say that segregation laws were promulgated with racist intent. And we’re having the same debate today: There is a law that is passed that is alleged to be discriminatory against a minority group. But the law is neutral on its face,” he says.