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Why did the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law select Homer Plessy?

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Plessy v. Ferguson judgment — Plessy v. Ferguson *Plessy* v. *Ferguson* judgment, issued by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 18, 1896, advancing the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws.

The Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law selected Homer Plessy as the plaintiff for their test case primarily because he was a person of mixed race.1

By choosing an individual who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth African American, the committee aimed to demonstrate that the Separate Car Act could not be consistently or fairly applied. They argued that the law failed to provide a clear definition of the white and "colored" races, making it unreasonable to assign the responsibility of determining a passenger's race to a railway conductor.123

Plessy was a member of the committee and a well-known figure in the New Orleans Creole community, having been involved in various local community-betterment groups. His selection was a strategic effort to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation laws under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause.321