Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards officially issued a posthumous pardon for the man behind the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson.
The pardon for Homer Plessy arrived nearly 97 years after his death, which occurred in 1925.
In 1892, Plessy boarded a whites-only railroad car in protest of a Louisiana state law segregating trains. Upon refusing to leave, he was arrested.
Plessy was charged with violating the "Separate Car" act. He pled guilty to the charges and Judge John Howard Ferguson fined him $25. Today, the fine would be around $763.59.
Upon his death, the conviction was still on Plessy's record as was the ruling from the Supreme Court. That ruling, from which the phrase "separate but equal" was derived, solidified whites-only areas, such as hotels, schools, and transportation. The ruling was enacted in much of the United States until the Supreme Court overturned it upon releasing its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
During Wednesday's ceremony in New Orleans, near the spot where Plessy was arrested, Plessy's and Ferguson's descendants were in attendance as Plessy was pardoned of the charge.
Keith Plessy, whose great-great-grandfather was Plessy's cousin, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great-granddaughter of Judge John Howard Ferguson, are now friends and have founded a nonprofit that advocates civil rights education.
Keith Plessy called the event "truly a blessed day for our ancestors ... and for children not yet born."
Since the pardon board vote, "I've had the feeling that my feet are not touching the ground because my ancestors are carrying me," he said.
The ruling was a 7-1 decision, with the dissenting voice belonging to Justice John Harlan. He believed the ruling "will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case."
The Dred Scott Case happened in 1857, in which it was stated no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen.
"Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences," wrote Justice Henry Billings Brown.
In 1892, Homer Plessy was a member of the Citizens Committee, a New Orleans group trying to overcome laws that rolled back post-Civil War advances in equality.
The 30-year-old shoemaker lacked the business, political and educational accomplishments of most of the other members, Keith Weldon Medley wrote in the book "We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson." But his light skin — court papers described him as someone whose "one-eighth African blood" was "not discernable" — positioned him for the train car protest.
"His one attribute was being white enough to gain access to the train and black enough to be arrested for doing so," Medley wrote.
The purpose of the pardon "is not to erase what happened 125 years ago but to acknowledge the wrong that was done," said Phoebe Ferguson.
Other recent efforts have acknowledged Plessy's role in history, including a 2018 vote by the New Orleans City Council to rename a section of the street where he tried to board the train in his honor.
The governor's office described this as the first pardon under Louisiana's 2006 Avery Alexander Act, which allows pardons for people convicted under laws that were intended to discriminate.
Former state Sen. Edwin Murray said he originally wrote the act to automatically pardon anyone convicted of breaking a law written to encode discrimination. He said he made it optional after people arrested for civil rights protests told him they considered the arrests a badge of honor.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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