Plessy and Ferguson Work to Promote Civil Rights Education
Filmmaker and photographer Phoebe Ferguson didn’t even know she was a descendant of Judge John Howard Ferguson until a man who bought her great-great grandfather’s house tracked her down. It was Judge Ferguson who upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine, a decision affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896.
Hotel bellman Keith Plessy, on the other hand, can remember his grade school teachers calling him to the front of the class when Plessy v. Ferguson was being discussed, the Washington Post reports. Plessy’s great-grandfather was the first cousin of Homer Adolph Plessy, a shoemaker who bought a railroad ticket on June 7, 1892, and sat in a white rail car as part of a planned challenge to the segregation law.
Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson met in 2004 and have since formed a foundation to educate others about the civil rights struggle and the infamous decision, overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
“I have an obligation and a privilege to keep my ancestor’s history alive,” Plessy told the Post. “What my ancestors dreamt about, I’m able to live.”
