On June 7, 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy bought a first-class ticket for a Louisiana commuter train and seated himself in a car for white riders only. When Plessy identified himself to the conductor as seven-eighths white, he was removed from the train and put under arrest. Homer Adolph Plessy looked white. Who was to say whether he was or wasn’t? Plessy’s legal case primarily pressed an argument about who was who, rather than who should ride where on a train.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, Plessy v. Ferguson was not a simple case of black vs. white separation, but rather a challenging and complex protest for U.S. law to fully accept mixed ancestry and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the long struggle for individual identity and multicultural recognition amid the dehumanizing and depersonalizing forces of American Negro slavery—and the Anglo-American white supremacy that drove it.
The book takes students and general readers through the extended gestation period that gave birth to one of the most oft-mentioned but widely misunderstood landmark law will cases in U.S. history. It provides a chronology, brief biographies of key figures, primary documents, an annotated bibliography, and an index all of which provide easy reading and quick reference. Modern readers will find the direct connections between Plessy’s story and contemporary racial currents in America intriguing.
