Kinny, P. (2022). The New Orleans Citizens Committee: Unheralded Activists who Challenged Jim Crow in Plessy v. Ferguson. Unc Charlotte Electronic Theses And Dissertations.
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Abstract
The Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890 required that White and African-American passengers ride in separate railcars. Eighteen leaders of the New Orleans Afro-Creole community formed the Citizens Committee for the purpose of initiating a legal case to test the constitutionality of such Jim Crow laws. Members of the Citizens Committee owned and operated the Crusader newspaper in which Rodolphe Desdunes and Louis Martinet espoused the radical egalitarian views of the Citizens Committee and exhorted their uniquely prosperous community to resist the emerging Jim Crow system. Prominent civil rights attorney, Albion W. Tourgée, and Martinet meticulously engineered the arrest of volunteer defendant Homer Plessy for violating the Separate Car Act and prosecuted the test case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.In the resulting landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws as long as such laws provided for equal accommodations. This decision was a crushing defeat for the Citizens Committee and ushered in a wave of Jim Crow laws throughout the South. On the other hand, Justice John Marshall Harlan authored a passionate dissenting opinion aligned with the egalitarian vision of the Citizens Committee. The efforts of the Citizens Committee left an important dual legacy for the twentieth-century civil rights movement. First, their determined resistance in a dangerous era combined with Harlan’s ringing dissent placed in motion Constitutional arguments against Jim Crow. Second, these events directly inspired Thurgood Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to obtain a reversal of Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and New Orleans activists such as Alexander P. Tureaud to achieve desegregation in New Orleans through non-violent resistance in the 1960s. Civil rights historians have not given the Citizens Committee the prominent place in civil rights history that their resolute efforts early in the Jim Crow era merit.
