When I learned that Pope Leo XIV is the descendant of Black Creoles from New Orleans, my thoughts turned to Homer Plessy, the New Orleans native who was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896.
The pope does not appear to be Black, but neither did Plessy, which is one of the keys to understanding the challenge he made to the racist Southern power structure of the late 19th century. In fact, it is fair to say that if Robert Francis Prevost could be transported back in time, he, too, would have been thrown out of a whites-only railroad car had he announced, as Plessy did, that he was part Black.
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Which is why we could regard Leo as the first pope in modern times who’s a person of color. (There may have been three Black popes during the early centuries of the Catholic Church.)
In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court found that a Louisiana law segregating public accommodations was constitutional despite the plain wording of the 14th Amendment, which says in part:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
According to Biography.com, Plessy, a shoemaker, considered himself one-eighth Black and could pass for white. In 1892, he challenged a state law passed two years earlier by purchasing a first-class railroad ticket, taking a seat in the whites-only section and then telling the conductor that he was part Black. He was thrown off the train, jailed and released the next day on $500 bond.
Plessy sued, appealed his conviction , arguing that his rights under the 13th (which outlawed slavery) and 14th Amendments had been violated, and his case eventually wended its way to the Supreme Court. Interestingly enough, the railroad company took Plessy’s side because it didn’t want to incur the additional expense of adding cars in order to enforce segregation.
Plessy v. Ferguson was the source of the infamous “separate but equal” ruling. The majority decision, written by Justice Henry Billings Brown, took the absurd view that just because public facilities are segregated doesn’t mean that whites and Blacks were being treated unequally. Brown wrote:
We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.
The decision, though, prompted an eloquent and far-reaching dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan, who pointed out the ridiculous nature of the majority’s position. His dissent is worth reading in full, but here’s the heart of it:
It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race, but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. But this argument does not meet the difficulty. Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.
Justice Harlan eventually prevailed, with the Supreme Court citing the 14th Amendment in striking down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and reversing Plessy v. Ferguson.
Thus it can be said that Pope Leo’s family has ties to the 20th century’s most important step forward for racial justice in the United States. Today, of course, brings its own challenges. In the early days of his papacy, Leo shows every sign of being a voice for moral clarity in his home country and across the world.
