Louis André Martinet / Office of L.A. Martinet, The Crusader & Comité Des Citoyens

A newspaper announcement started the committee. On September 5, 1891, the Crusader told its readers that the Comité des Citoyens existed: French-speaking men of African descent organized against the Separate Car Law of 1890 and the white supremacy that followed Reconstruction. They raised money for a test case, with member benevolent societies later helping to pay for the cases, and brought in two white lawyers, Albion W. Tourgée of New York and James C. Walker of New Orleans. The paper that carried the notice was Louis Martinet's, and the fight it funded became Plessy v. Ferguson.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.3 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.3 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 — 0.4 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.5 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• America's First Movie Theater / Vitascope Hall — steps away
• The Birthplace of "Dixie" — steps away
• New Orleans Slave Depot — steps away
• Bank's Arcade — 0.2 mi