Plessy v. Ferguson - Press Street Railroad Yards

The first attempt at a test case failed on a technicality. The Comite des Citoyens had arranged the arrest of the musician Daniel Desdunes, but his trip crossed a state line and the case went nowhere. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket to Covington on the East Louisiana Railroad at the Press Street depot and sat in the car for whites. When conductor J. J. Dowling told him to move, he refused, and private detective Chris Cain arrested him. The committee posted bond the next day. Judge John Howard Ferguson rejected his challenge on November 18.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — 1.0 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.2 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 1.2 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.
• Congo Square — 1.2 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.

More markers nearby

• Faubourg Marigny — 0.6 mi
• New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade — 0.6 mi
• French Market — 0.7 mi
• Old Ursuline Convent — 0.8 mi