Today, February 12, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the president without whom, as Barack Obama said today, our current chief executive's journey would not have been possible.
It is also the 100th anniversary of another birth, that of the NAACP, founded this date in 1909, supplanting the Niagara Movement, which had been founded four years earlier by W. E. B. Du Bois, William Trotter and others. Despite its noble aims of defeating segregation and disenfranchisement, the Niagara group suffered from both its small size and its men-only status.
In 1909, the Niagara founders joined forces with prominent white and female social justice advocates to found the NAACP.
Louisiana has always been central to the push for civil rights in America. Our state provided the greatest number of African American troops to the Union Army during the Civil War and served as a laboratory for Reconstructionist ideas, such as the 10% plan, under which a state was re-admitted to the Union when 10% of the electorate took an oath of loyalty and renounced slavery.
But long before the war, New Orleans' Faubourg Treme, the nation's oldest black neighborhood, was a center for free born and freed African Americans, a cultural and political cauldron where residents were free to own property, publish newspapers, found schools and agitate for equal rights.
It was in Treme that a group of citizens, alarmed at segregationist laws passed in the wake of Reconstruction, formed the “Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law.” This law, passed in 1890 by the state legislature, required separate cars on public trains for black and white riders. The Citizen's Committee made a plan to test this and other separate accommodations laws in the courts.
With legal advice from prominent attorney Louis Martinet, Treme resident Homer J. Plessy volunteered to stand as the test case. On June 7, 1892, he seated himself in the Whites car of an East Louisiana Railroad train from New Orleans to Covington. When asked by the conductor if he was black or white, Plessy, who was 7/8 white, said he was a black man and refused to leave the car. He was removed from the train and arrested.
(The Committee had deliberately chosen Plessy because he was white enough to buy the ticket, and had itself hired the detective who arrested him and turned him over to police, to make sure there was a case to test.)
Despite his argument in the Criminal District Court for Orleans Parish that the Seperate Car Law was unconstitutional, Judge John H. Ferguson convicted him. The State Supreme Court upheld the judgement but granted Plessy's writ of error, enabling him to take his case to the United States Supreme Court.
In 1896, the Supreme Court found against Plessy, establishing the doctrine of "separate but equal" accommodations as the law of the land and ushering in the national rule of Jim Crow.
Today, at the corner of Royal and Press Streets, site of the Press Street Railyard where Plessy was ejected from the East Louisiana Railroad train, a group assembled to unveil a plaque honoring Plessy's courage and the progress made toward true equality. Among the guests and speakers were the descendants of Plessy and Ferguson, the widow of the first African American Justice of the state Supreme Court, the first female African American Jusitice, who replaced him, civil rights leaders, historians, students (including the Student Citizens Committe, who vow to continue the original Committee's work to end inequality), politicians, members of the media and proud citizens of our city.
Organized by the education foundation started by Keith Plessy, fourth-generation cousin of Homer Plessy, and Phoebe Ferguson, great-great-granddaughter of Judge John Ferguson, the ceremony marked the first of many physical commemorations of uncelebrated sites of civil rights struggles in New Orleans.
Here are a few of the people who attended.
Miriam Marie Victorianne Ortique and Rhesa Marie McDonald, respectively the widow and daughter of Revius Ortique, the first African American justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Mrs. Ortique relayed to me the story of her husband pressuring LBJ to put more African Americans on the federal bench and Johnson patting the shoulder of Thurgood Marsall, also present, and saying, "I'm gonna be the president who puts the first Negro on the Supreme Court."
Justice Bernette Joshua Johnson, who currently holds the seat Ortique once held.
The choir of McDonough 35, the city's first public high school for African Americans, practices their chops.
Students from McD 35, Frederick Douglass, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts are just some of the members of the Student Citizens Committee, reciting the original declaration to defy and test the Public Car Act.
Prof. Lawrence Powell of Tulane discusses the education of Lincoln, compliments of an 1864 delegation from Treme, New Orleans.
Michael G. Bagneris, Judge of Orleans Parish Civil District Court, today's master of ceremonies.
Kieth Plessy talks about the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation. Phoebe Ferguson could not attend as she was injured in a traffic accident Wednesday night.
Noel Anderson, Phoebe's daughter and great-great-great-granddaughter of Judge Ferguson, under the plaque commemorating the spot where Homer Plessy was ejected from the train.
Just like the election of Barack Obama, today's ceremony won't end the struggle for equal rights in America or New Orleans. But it marks another step in our long journey of understanding, respect and love.
It's a day for celebration.