“I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.” Exodus 20:5
On December 1, 1955, the seminal event of the civil rights movement took place.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The whole incident had been carefully coordinated by the NAACP and exploited for maximum effect. The NAACP had tipped reporters off as to what was happening so that there were news-reporters waiting for her at the police station that she was brought in for processing for violating legalized racial segregation on public transit in Montgomery. The plan the entire time was to take this issue all the way to the United States Supreme Court and have the legality of segregation in the United States decided once and for all.
But this had already been done on July 7, 1892. On that day, it wasn’t the NAACP but a group called the Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans who recruited a man named Homer Plessy to deliberately violate Louisiana’s 1890 separate-car law just like the NAACP had recruited Rosa Parks. And just like the NAACP, their intention was to take the issue all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans had even warned the railroad ahead of time to let them know what they were planning on doing. The railroad company was even on their side. They didn’t like legalized racial segregation because that meant that they had to foot the bill to buy more railcars than they actually need just to accommodate keeping black and white passengers separated.
Homer Plessy was only 1/8th black. In case you’re not good with fractions that means he was 7/8ths white. He was what white supremacist classified as an octoroon. White supremacy was so thoroughly accepted as the gospel that white supremacist took the time to quantify how white people were and then designating different legal statuses accordingly. Homer Plessy was so white looking that he could’ve ridden anywhere, on anything he wanted and no one would’ve questioned it. So why did he get involved? He was trying to make a point. In fact, Homer Plessy was chosen BECAUSE of how he looked.
The point was to use how white Plessy looked to shine a spotlight on how ridiculous racial segregation is. Whites sit next to Octoroons and Quadroons every day on public transportation. They are even marrying them. They just didn’t know it. I guess what G.I. Joe said was true, “knowing is half the battle”.
So although whites and blacks share railcars every single day and no one white catches the cooties white supremacist in the state of Louisiana insisted on passing legislation that treated race like an infectious disease.
Homer Plessy was born during the Reconstruction, that brief period right after the American Civil War when progressives in the North took control over the South and legalized civility between blacks and whites. When Plessy was a child, for example, blacks in Louisiana could marry whomever they fell in love with, they could sit anywhere they wanted on public transportation and they even attended integrated schools.
Prior to the Reconstruction, blacks could not enter into legal contracts of any kind including marriage. Now they could get married and have the state recognize those marriages. Blacks were paid for their work. Progressives in the north put a stop to states like Georgia who were forcibly taking children away from black parents under the ruse of “placing them in good homes” until the child “reached the age of consent at twenty-one” and then dropping them off at plantations/orphanages as unpaid labor for plantation owners who refused to pay blacks an honest day pay for an honest day of work on the sheer principle of it.
Homer Plessy wasn’t born in a world with all of that foolishness, but it was the world he was living in 1896 because as soon as the Northern progressives left and handed power back to the pro-slavery white supremacists all of that ignorance returned with a vengeance.
When I read up on Plessy vs Ferguson I was reminded of the scripture in the Bible Exodus 20:5 where God proudly admits to punishing the children of the father for generations. “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.”
At 1/8th black, Plessy’s nearest black relative was his great, great grandfather. Everyone else in his family was 100% white. Plessy was paying for the “sin” of his great, great grandfather being black.
When the NAACP decided to take on segregation in Alabama with Rosa Parks, they strongly believed that the opinion of the court had moved towards being more progressive and so there was a chance that the court would rule in their favor. They gambled and they won.
When Plessy took his case to the United States Supreme Court White supremacy was still very much a deeply accepted unquestioned fact. They gambled and they lost.
The Supreme Court ruled that there was absolutely nothing wrong with segregating the races as long as both facilities, the black and the white, were “equal”. The ramifications of this court ruling established separate but equal and legalized state mandated segregation everywhere in the United States until the Supreme Court reversed their decision in 1954, almost 60 years later.
