Today in Labor History June 7, 1892: The authorities arrested Homer Plessy for refusing to leave his seat in the "whites-only" car of a train. He lost the resulting court case, the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which codified segregation and paved the way for Jim Crow. The ruling is commonly known as “separate, but equal,” and was later ruled “unequal” in actuality, in 1954, in Brown v Board of Education.
On the one-year anniversary of Plessy’s act of civil disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi was forcibly ejected from a train in Pietermaritzberg, South Africa for refusing to vacate a 1st class carriage for a white man, in a similar act of civil disobedience.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #plessy #racism #jimcrow #gandhi #southafrica #civildisobedience #directaction #brownvboardofeducation #SCOTUS #BlackMastodon
