Homer Adolph Plessy

His birth year is uncertain: records say 1858, 1862 or 1863. Homer Plessy, a French-speaking Creole of color, was the son of a carpenter and a seamstress, and he worked as a shoemaker, then as a warehouseman, clerk and premium collector for the People's Life Insurance Company. After the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1896, he pleaded guilty on February 11, 1897 and paid a $25 fine. He died on March 1, 1925 and was buried in the Debergue-Blanco family tomb here. Governor John Bel Edwards granted him a posthumous pardon on January 5, 2022.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 0.3 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Bernard de Marigny — steps away
• Marie Laveau — steps away
• Déterrer Storyville — steps away
• Congo Square — 0.2 mi