Narrator: On the first of September 1891, eighteen prominent New Orleanians assembled at the French Quarter offices of The Crusader, the city's black weekly newspaper, to discuss a looming crisis.
Fourteen years had passed since federal Reconstruction had come to an end -- and in that time, the once-buoyant hopes of black Americans had been swamped by savage violence. Over the previous year alone, more than a hundred black southerners had been lynched -- an average of two each week.
Racial discrimination, meanwhile, had begun to be written into law. In Louisiana, the legislature recently had passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railroad companies to provide separate accommodations for white and black passengers, and similar laws already were pending in five other states across the South.
Rebecca Scott, Historian: Equal but separate, that was the phrase and what was happening in that moment of equal but separate had to do with much more than the first-class railway car. It had to do with the state of Louisiana saying to its population of color, you are different. You are to be excluded.
Narrator: Now, The Crusader's chief editorial contributor, Rodolphe Desdunes, had called upon the elite in New Orleans' black community to spearhead the resistance. This "law is unconstitutional," Desdunes argued. "It is like a slap in the face of every member of the black race."
Like most of those present at The Crusader meeting, Desdunes was a so-called "Creole of color" and hailed from the community of blacks who had been free before the Civil War.
Born in 1849 to a Haitian father and a Cuban mother, he had grown up in the Vieux Carré, where many people of color were so light-skinned as to be indistinguishable from whites; where French was spoken in the streets; and where the ideals of the French Revolution -- liberté, fraternité and egalité -- could be easily recited by any school-aged child. [alt: liberty, fraternity, equality]
Too young to have participated in the equal rights struggles during Reconstruction, Desdunes was instead their beneficiary -- and had come of age in the most integrated city in the South.
Kalamu ya Salaam, Writer: Here you have people who had been living free for years and years -- doctors, lawyers, craftspeople, etc. And all of a sudden you're in a society where they had to have a separate car for people of color and a separate car for whites. They fought against it.
Raphael Cassimere, Jr., Historian: These people believed that it was illegal to impose racial segregation in public places. They were confident if they got this to court, the courts were going to rule that the state does not have the right to force passengers to sit in certain cars.
Narrator: Calling themselves the Citizens Committee, Desdunes and his fellow activists began to meet in secret at The Crusader's offices -- and over the next several months, their plan took shape.
A person of color would be sent to board a whites-only railroad car. When the conductor directed him to the car for blacks, he would refuse to go. Once he had been arrested and charged, the Citizens Committee legal team would use his case to challenge the Separate Car Act in the courts.
The man selected to act the part of the passenger was a fellow New Orleanian, a shoemaker named Homer Plessy. By his own accounting, Plessy was seven-eighths white -- and the African blood, he noted, was "not discernible."
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: What they wanted to show is if you couldn't tell the difference between a black person and a white person isn't any line of racial differentiation by definition arbitrary and capricious? I mean how ... if you can't tell the difference, how can you make a law saying that people should be separated?
Narrator: In November 1892, in a session of the Louisiana Criminal Court, Judge John Howard Ferguson held Homer Plessy guilty of violating the Separate Car Act.
The Citizens Committee would appeal the ruling, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. As Desdunes explained to those who criticized the move as too aggressive: "We believe that it is ... more noble and worthy to fight than to show oneself passive and resigned."
Rebecca Scott, Historian: Rodolphe Desdunes was fighting this one to win it. But he was also fighting this one for the record. So that if anyone claimed that what forced racial segregation was simply a customary means of southern life, there would be an indisputable record that this group of people had fought it tooth and nail.
Narrator: It took more than four years for Plessy v. Ferguson to work its way through the courts. Meanwhile, the segregation laws on Louisiana's books multiplied.
Then came the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Plessy. In May 1896, with only one Justice dissenting, the Court upheld the right of states to segregate people on the basis of race. Among those rendering the majority opinion was Justice Edward Douglas White, member of the New Orleans Pickwick Club, formerly Private White, Company E, Crescent City White League. Desdunes and his fellow activists were crushed. "Notwithstanding this decision," they wrote, "we, as freemen, still believe that we were right."
Rebecca Scott, Historian: When we think back on this moment, and the lost opportunity, it is extraordinarily poignant. I think part of what makes it so painful, is to realize that when they lost in 1896, it meant that the entire country lost an opportunity to really embody the new birth of freedom that the Civil War had been meant to create. And it opened up the space for something very different to be built. And once that edifice of white supremacy was built it would be impossible to dismantle, by normal political means.
Narrator: Soon after the decision, The Crusader ceased publication and the Citizens Committee disbanded.
Over the next several years, under so-called Jim Crow statutes, blacks in New Orleans and throughout the South would be deprived of the right to vote, and relegated to separate facilities that, in most cases, were decidedly unequal. By World War I, even the Catholic Churches would impose the color line.
But statutes alone could not unravel the racial complexity of New Orleans. Just before Jim Crow was to take effect on the city's streetcars in 1902, the president of one company complained that the new law imposed an unfair burden.
James Gill, Journalist: The company made a statement and I can't remember it verbatim, but the effect was ... we picked ... our conductors are intelligent, educated men and they're competent and can do a reasonable job, but no one can tell the difference between blacks and whites in this place.
Narrator: As if to prove to the point, in 1921, long after blacks had been barred from the polls, Homer Plessy would fill out a voter registration card -- and list his race as "white."