BOOKS BY AMY NATHAN
TOGETHER: Plessy and Ferguson, SECOND EDITION
TOGETHER: Plessy and Ferguson, Second Edition
by Amy Nathan / Paul Dry Books, 2023
Keith Plessy & Phoebe Ferguson were born in New Orleans in 1957. Sixty-five years earlier a member of each family had met in a courtroom when Judge John Howard Ferguson found Homer Plessy guilty of breaking the law by sitting in a train car for white riders. The case of Plessy v. Ferguson went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1896 that "separate-but-equal" was constitutional, sparking decades of unjust laws and attitudes. TOGETHER threads the personal stories of Keith and Phoebe into the history of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, race relations, and the civil rights movement, telling the inspiring tale of how they changed the ending of the story that links their families in history by forming the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation (now called the Plessy & Ferguson Initiative). "It's a flip on the script," as Keith Plessy says in the book—including the "ultimate flip on the script" with the pardon for Homer Plessy that they helped win in 2022, as described in the Epilogue of the new Second Edition of TOGETHER.
Cover Art © Ayo Scott