Nearly a century after his death, Homer Plessy is set to have his conviction for crossing the color line wiped clean. At an emotional hearing on Friday, the Louisiana Pardon Board unanimously ...

Critically important to the legal team is Plessy’s color — that he has “seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African blood,” as Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown will write in ...

One of the many “free people of color” who had flocked to New Orleans, mostly of French-speaking Creole descent, Plessy had grown up in a time of societal integration, education and equality.

Plessy’s arrest was carefully choreographed ... “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality ...

New Orleans activists of color in Comité des Citoyens (the Citizens’ Committee) devised a plan for Plessy to board a train on June 7, 1892, and intentionally sit in the “whites only” section.

Plessy, then 30 years old ... There is no caste here," Harlan wrote. "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all ...

For much of Plessy’s young life, New Orleans, with its large population of former slaves and so-called “free people of color,” had enjoyed at least a semblance of societal integration and ...

Plessy had boarded the East Louisiana Railway ... The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of ...

The color of our skin. All of us are a part of ... often good protection from the sun — causes trouble. Homer Plessy was a very light-skinned Black man, a Creole who acknowledged his Black ...

Plessy’s act of civil disobedience followed ... “Its only effect is to perpetuate the stigma of color—to make the curse immortal, incurable, inevitable,” he argued. The court disagreed.

Plessy was found guilty in November of violating ... it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality ...