The struggle for African-American’s rights to freedom and equality began long ago, back when Negroes were slaves and had very little voice. On June 17, 1892, a 30-year-old African American shoemaker named Homer Plessy made a mark on history when he was put in jail for sitting in a “white” car of the East Louisiana railroad. Homer Plessy bravely stood up against the Jim Crow laws that plagued the nation, deeming segregation as moral order. Plessy went to the state of Louisiana in Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, the judge at the trial was John Howard Ferguson who found Plessy guilty. This caused an uproar from all African-Americans at the time and although the verdict was sentenced, Plessy didn’t quit his fight to gain what he believed the Negroes deserved, and that was their freedom. Plessy v. Ferguson, trialed through the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 and ruled in the favor of legal segregation. The result was a Louisiana law, stating that separate but equal accommodations for blacks and whites were constitutional. This was a crucial court trial that allowed legal justification for many other federal and state actions that followed including more of those very unlikable Jim Crow laws, keeping blacks separated from whites. It was a day-to-day struggle for Homer Plessy and those who aided him in his quest for freedom. However, it was a fight worth believing in. It was a cause that shook the nation and served as a model for future activists of how they should present their cases. Ultimately, in the future, less than a century later, Plessy’s fight finally began to have substance. Homer Plessy started a revolution that many influential and very important Civil Rights moguls followed. In fact, it wasn’t until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned. This law finally allowed blacks and whites to live together in an interracial society.
The author of We as Freemen is New Orleans native, African-American Keith Weldon...