Leadership Lessons from Plessy v. Ferguson
We invite you to watch a segment of the CBS Mornings show, in which justice, denied for 130 years, was finally achieved for Homer A. Plessy, pardoned posthumously for the “crime” of sitting in a car designated for so-called “whites” when he, based on ancestry, was marked as partially “black.”
Plessy was a Creole, a French-speaking “mixed-race” group of light-skinned folks who often could pass for white. Here’s a photo of Plessy:
Before the Civil War, many Creoles had attained education and achieved wealth. But as the century was coming to a close, white supremacist movements fought to enshrine their vicious doctrines throughout the society. As an activist member of a civil rights Citizens Committee, Plessy volunteered to stage an intervention against the Separate Car Act, established in Louisiana in 1890, by sitting in a car reserved for “whites.”
In the Plessy v. Ferguson segregation case of 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of upholding that racist law based on the folklore of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction era. This ruling established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the notion that even by being separated in public and in the allocation of public resources, so-called whites and blacks could remain equal.
Plessy’s lawyer, Albion Tourgée, argued that the effect of this doctrine was to “perpetuate the stigma of color—to make the curse immortal, incurable, inevitable.” He was right: this legal doctrine was used to enforce Jim Crow segregation laws until the Brown v. Board decision struck it down in 1954.
Leadership Lessons from Plessy v. Ferguson, Then to Now
Phoebe Ferguson, Kate Dillingham, and Keith M. Plessy
We’re inviting you to watch the CBS segment because of the leadership lessons from the case and its aftermath. The lessons include:
The sole dissenter in the Plessy v. Ferguson case was Justice John Marshall Harlan, who wrote: “The arbitrary separation of citizens based on race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” Harlan defied the racist conventions of the day and stood on true Constitutional principles.
Descendants of the parties of the case—Phoebe Ferguson and Keith Plessy—exercised leadership by joining forces as friends and creating a foundation to memorialize the lessons from the case and influence how its taught in schools.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards exercised political and civic leadership by pardoning Homer A. Plessy posthumously, the first such decision in the state’s history.
We honor each of the above for their exemplary moral leadership and courage.