Judge. He received a place in American history as the Orleans Parish, Louisiana, criminal court judge, who became the defendant in the 1896 United States Supreme Court case of Plessy vs Ferguson. This court case gave the landmark decision that upheld the constitutional right of racial segregation under the "Separate but Equal" doctrine. The case was about an 1892 incident in which Homer Plessy, a thirty-year-old man of a mixed race, had purchased a first-class ticket on a train, but according to the Louisiana Separate Car Act Volume 1 Section Act 111, 1890, the conductor had to ask passengers in the first-class car their race. Although Plessy was 7/8 Caucasian, he replied, "Colored" and was instructed to go to the "colored only" train car. The "colored only" car was not equal to the first-class ticket that he had purchased. Since he refused to leave the first-class car, he was thrown off the train, had a night in jail before bond was paid, and with the financial and emotional support of news paper columnist Rudolphe Lucien Desdunes, former Union soldiers, writers and artist, along with some high-ranking politicians, he took his case to the court, where Ferguson was the preceding judge. His attorney was Albion Winegar Tourgee. After losing the case, Plessy took the case to the Louisiana State Supreme Court in 1893 and later the United States Supreme Court in 1896. The case, which bore the name Plessy vs Ferguson, upheld that the Louisiana Separate Car Act was not in violation of neither the 13th Amendment nor the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The accommodations on the train for both white and the colored were said "to be separate but equal." The ruling established a solid start of the Jim Crow era and legalizing apartheid in the United States. John Howard Ferguson was born into a family that had been for generations part of the Martha's Vineyard Master Mariners. Instead becoming a mariner, he decided to become a school teacher before studying law in Boston under Benjamin F. Hallett, who taught him law and politics. Upon finishing his study, he relocated to New Orleans. Considered by Louisianians to be a carpetbagger from the north, he began his law practice in 1865, married and had three sons. He served in the Louisiana State House of Representatives before being tapped in 1892 for the judgeship at the Criminal District Court, Section A. for the Parish of New Orleans. He had ruled previously that the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890, a law stating that Louisiana train companies had to provide but equal accommodations for white and non-white passengers was unconstitutional on trains traveling through several states as the Car Act was not every state's law. Plessy's train did not leave the State of Louisiana, hence Ferguson found Plessy guilty of not leaving the "White" car as he was to obey the Louisiana law of the Separate Car Act. Plessy appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which held-up the previous decision. At this point, Plessy petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States where Judge Ferguson was named as the defendant in the landmark decision. The ruling of "Separate but Equal" stood from 1896 until the Federal Supreme Court's historical Brown vs Board of Education ruling in 1954. The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation has been formed with the mission to teach the history of the Plessy vs Ferguson Federal Court case and why it is still relevant today. On January 6, 2022 Louisiana Governor Bel Edwards signed the posthumous pardon for Plessy near the site of the 1896 arrest with the statement "there is no expiration on justice."