Dr Michael Ross
speaker
223 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Dr Michael Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Homer Plessy is a young man.
He's in his 20s.
He is a shoemaker who lives in the famous Afro-Creole neighborhood of New Orleans, the Treme.
And he is associated with a group called the Committee of Citizens.
who have organized to litigate against Louisiana's efforts to mandate separate facilities in public accommodations.
He is an Afro-Creole.
He comes out of the Francophone tradition of New Orleans.
He and his colleagues are descended from free persons of color before the Civil War, who are an elite group of poets and writers and musicians.
well-educated bilingual people who had known some limited civil rights before the Civil War, had experienced the heady days of the possibility during Reconstruction, and were now outraged that the state government of Louisiana was attempting to restore a caste system in their state and in the American South.
Many of the free persons of color were of mixed race heritage, or mulatto, a term used in the 19th century.
They had...
Their families had included white French-speaking gentlemen, educated white women at times.
And Homer Plessy, although in the documents they're going to say he is seven-eighths white, really it's a more complicated story than that.
But they were making a point that
The Louisiana law said that what had to happen is that conductors on railroads would have to patrol the cars determining who was white and who was black and move any black passenger who was sitting in one of the white cars into the black cars.
And in Louisiana, where there's all kinds of permutations of color and not just amongst mixed race people, but there's a large number of Sicilian immigrants.
It's a place where, you know, skin tone was not particularly revealing of what race or heritage you were.
The plaintiffs, Homer Plessy and the Committee of Citizens, are arguing that not only is this law largely unenforceable, but it places the railroad and the railroad conductors in an untenable position of being the ones who officially declare for the state who's white and who's black.
It is manufactured in the sense that although these kind of incidents were happening all the time, they deliberately chose Plessy, the Committee of Citizens, which is the civil rights legal activist group who organized the challenge to the law.
They had notified the railroad that they were going to do this.
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