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Saturday, January 2, 2010 -
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Free and open to the public
Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site
1515 SE Monroe • Topeka, Kansas
An Exhibition from the Louisiana State Museum
In June 1892, Homer Plessy, an African American man, boarded the East Louisiana Railroad #8 train in New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana, and took a seat in the first-class compartment of a whites-only train car. His intention was to test a Louisiana law that allowed separate railroad cars for African Americans and whites. Little did he know that the result would be one of the most pivotal civil rights cases in American history, decided four years later by the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sanctioned the doctrine of "separate but equal," legalizing segregation in the United States for the next fifty-eight years until the decision was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
This traveling exhibition observes the one hundredth anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark 1896 decision, analyzing the events leading up to Plessy's arrest on the train, Plessy's trials and appeals, and the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision. Easy-to-read text panels and reproductions of original photographs and documents relating to the case are utilized to illustrate the circumstances surrounding the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in the context of the civil rights movement in the South, particularly Louisiana.
| Presented by the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research and the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site as part of the 2009-2010 program series, Unfolding Untold Stories. Download the 2009-2010 program brochure (1.8 MB PDF). | |||
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Series sponsored in part by: |
All Rights Reserved.
Created: November 17, 2009.
URL: http://brownvboard.org/programs/201001publictransporation.htm.