Homer Plessy Day event at NOCCA
Remembering Reconstruction: Late-19th-Century Freedom Struggles in History and Memory
NOCCA’s Ellis Marsalis Jazz Studio, 2800 Chartres Street, New Orleans
Monday, June 6, from 6pm to 7:30pm
Free and open to the public
Each June, The NOCCA Institute and the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation celebrate Plessy Day. This year’s event features historian, educator, and activist Leon Waters as well as NOCCA students, who will discuss post-Civil War Reconstruction in the American South.
During the Reconstruction era, African Americans and multi-racial coalitions made tremendous gains in securing legal, political, social, and economic rights. However, the restoration of the planter class to political power overturned most of this progress. When the Citizens’ Committee put Homer Plessy on the train at NOCCA’s front door in 1892, they did so to rebuff the re-segregation laws that were being enacted across the South–laws that aimed to undo much of the progress that had been made on the civil rights front.
On Monday, June 6, please join rising 12th graders from NOCCA, who will read their writings on Reconstruction in American history, memory, and education. Mr. Waters will then respond to these papers.
Afterward, we will open the floor for a discussion of what we’ve heard from our panelists, and of the significance of Reconstruction to our understanding of the Citizens’ Committee and the Plessy case.