I suspect that there is no extant picture of Homer Plessy because he was working-class and probably did not have his picture taken often if at all. In the 1890s, a portrait was a luxury. Black scholars and race leaders, not shoemakers, had portraits. Even if there was once a picture, in a city that suffers from floods, winds, and weather, so much family history has been lost. In addition to the visual silence, there is an archival one; none of the extant correspondence between the members of the Citizens’ Committee and their attorney, Albion Tourgée, includes any personal, political, or professional reference to Plessy. In the elder Desdunes’s 1911 book Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire (Our People and Our History), a history of the Creole of Color community in New Orleans, the only mention of Plessy reports that “the Committee engaged Mr. Homere [sic] Plessy as its representative.”
Like his well-known forebear, Keith Plessy is a working-class activist and a New Orleans native. He has worked as a bellman at the New Orleans Marriot on Canal Street for nearly as long as the centrally located modern hotel has existed. Along with filmmaker Phoebe Ferguson, a descendant of Judge John Howard Ferguson, the local judge whose decision against Homer Plessy connected his name to the case forever, Keith established the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation in 2004. They are working to increase public understanding of this historic case. To date, their organization has erected five historical markers in the city and state, worked to have June 7 declared Homer A. Plessy Day, and led the charge for New Orleans to have the street where Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana railcar designated Homer Plessy Way.
Well before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was home to one of the largest communities of gens de couleur libre, or free people of color, in the South, where people of mixed European, Native American, and African descent battled to establish themselves as free in a slave society. Some were manumitted, educated, and propertied by their European fathers, while others had migrated to the port city from Haiti and Cuba. Plessy’s paternal grandfather, Germain Plessy, was a white Frenchman who fled to New Orleans in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and had a family with a free woman of color. But when Keith Plessy told me his family history, he began with his great-grandmother, Agnes Mathieu, who successfully sued for her freedom in the courts after a slaveholder refused to honor his promise to allow her to purchase her freedom. He connected her determined advocacy with Homer Plessy’s and, implicitly, with his own.
Working-class Creoles of Color like Plessy were set apart from both the elite Creoles of Color—the New Orleans equivalents of the “talented tenth”—and the masses of Black workers whose ancestors had been in bondage. Plessy was a shoemaker. Keith Plessy said he was “raised to the trade” that his stepfather, Victor Dupart, passed down. But Dupart passed down a legacy of activism as well; he had been active in the 1873 Unification movement, a short-lived but valiant effort to halt political, social, and economic discrimination. Dupart was one of the published signatories of the movement’s Appeal for the Unification of the People of Louisiana.
At the time of the arrest in 1892, Plessy lived with his wife in a rented house on North Claiborne Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined thoroughfare in the Faubourg Tremé, an integrated working-class neighborhood on the French side of Canal Street. He served as the vice president of a local education reform organization, the Justice, Protective, Educational and Social Club, that resisted racism in New Orleans schools. Perhaps Plessy saw the work of the Citizens’ Committee as an extension of his own interest in fighting segregation. The committee held mass meetings in Congregation Hall, just steps from Plessy’s home. We can’t know exactly what connected him to the effort. Maybe he was drawn by a flyer to attend a meeting of the Citizens’ Committee. Perhaps because of his racial ambiguity, relative youth, and interest in activism, he was asked to volunteer on the Citizens’ Committee. These ambiguities remind us why Keith Plessy is digging. So much of this past is long gone.
When I googled Homer Plessy’s 1892 home address, 1108 North Claiborne Avenue, I saw nothing but concrete. The shotgun house where Plessy lived with his young wife is long gone, razed in 1968 to construct Highway 10. There is no remnant of his life on a tree-lined street so wide that children played ball on the grassy neutral ground in the middle. You’ll see no hint as to why that avenue was the site of Black Mardi Gras, where the Zulus and Mardi Gras Indians would parade annually. As in so much of the country, the historic landscape of the lives of Tremé’s everyday Black working men and women is gone, wiped away by politicians seeking urban renewal and labeling Black property as blighted. Homer Plessy put his life on the line to fight to preserve his citizenship, yet policy makers and planners saw the landscape of his New Orleans as disposable. The work of preservation that Keith Plessy is doing is urgent. The landscapes of African American history are as vulnerable to gentrification today as they were decades ago to eminent domain and urban renewal. But this work has a hold on him, perhaps because Homer Plessy is still with us. As Keith Plessy said, when “you start looking for your ancestors, you find out they have been looking for you all along.”
JOHN WAYNE NILES
ERMIAS JOSEPH ASGHEDOM
Mahogany L. Browne
Gunshot wound
is a violent way to say gone missing
Your body will be laid to rest
by your family’s devoted palms
Black people will always find each other
in the passage between death and America
A country designed in an image of rot
But we’ve always been able to ferment the good
knuckle deep in prayer despite the steel
Eat well
Sleep sound
Faith in the hands that raise children and wheat
This is what happens when you blind divine and brilliant
A smoke signal is sent to snuff you clean off this good land
Your land
The way your blood is righteous in the toiled soil
Until a home
a community
a church
is centered
start boom then born
Migration for freedom is a drinking gourd anthem
Is a liberation of black & black & brown dot link & link our dna
Listen
The time is ours
Blow the doubt to bits
Missing gone say
Hush
The secret to Nicodemus
beats beneath the sternum in Compton