I decided to do my poem on the Plessy V. Ferguson case. I chose this because this court case showed how bad racism was in the past and how it was unfair to anybody who had even the smallest amount of African blood in them. Plessy V. Ferguson was a case in which Homer Adolph Plessy, a mixed race male, who was arrested and jailed for taking an empty seat in a whites only facility on a railroad car after refusing to move. Plessy refused to move to the other railroad section where non-whites would be forced to sit. These sections were separated from the white only section. However, this section was in a much more poor condition than the white only section. This represented many of the different segregated facilities such as water fountains, bathrooms, schools, and any other social places.
My poem focuses on how Plessy was rejected his rights and how it affected the people of the black communities. It begins with the horrors of the dawn of the Jim Crow Era, then the racial segregation between whites and blacks causing such a disturbing image that these segregated facilities were unequal in many ways such as the conditions of these facilities showing that separate was not equal. I later describe Homer Plessy as a mixed raced man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighths black. Though he was mostly white his skin color had caused his arrest. I wonder if he had a lighter skin color would he had been arrested for refusing to move?
This Court case makes me sick because of how unfair “seperate but equal” really was. The fact that the court had rejected his argument and denied that his rights were violated is disturbing. Another reason why this makes me upset is because it did not help others in the black communities, it made segregation worse and caused more troubles for the black community.
