June 7, 1892

Homer Plessy

Homer Plessy is arrested in a planned challenge to segregation

Plessy's ancestry was not discernible, so he answered the conductor's racial question himself to make the arrest possible.

4:35 p.m., 7 June 1892

On 7 June 1892, Homer Plessy paid for first-class passage on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covington, boarded the 4:15 p.m. train and sat in a coach assigned to white passengers.

When conductor J. J. Dowling asked whether he was a “colored man,” Plessy answered yes and refused the order to move. He was forcibly removed and arrested at about 4:35 p.m., still holding his first-class ticket.

Everyone in the scene was in on it

This was not a spontaneous dispute over a seat. The Comité des Citoyens organized the action as a test of Louisiana's Separate Car Act, with the cooperation of a railway that enforced the law reluctantly.

Detective Christopher C. Cain had been hired in advance to make the arrest under the precise statute being challenged, and the train was stopped near the depot so he could remove Plessy.

A prosecution to appeal

The Supreme Court record later described Plessy as seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African. The Separate Car Act carried a $25 fine or twenty days in jail for a passenger.

Plessy was booked for violating the act and held to answer in New Orleans. The Comité now had the intrastate prosecution its lawyers needed to challenge the statute in court.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

June 7 is established by the Supreme Court’s own statement of facts, the Library of Congress timeline and the NPS Plessy biography. A separate NPS teaching page gives June 8, but that conflicts with the primary judicial record.
Accounts differ on whether Plessy spent the night in jail or obtained bond that evening; the primary record securely establishes removal, imprisonment and the resulting charge.