Keith Plessy

Cofounder and President Keith Plessy is a native New Orleanian from the Seventh Ward and a first cousin three times removed of Homer Plessy. Plessy has worked in the hospitality industry at the New Orleans Marriott for more than 40 years, since his graduation from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) in 1976. Three years after graduating from NOCCA, he designed and painted the images of more than 100 famous African Americans at his former elementary school—the historic Black institution Valena C. Jones Elementary School—as a thank you to his early childhood teachers. In 1997, Plessy met one of his heroes and a leader of the modern civil rights movement, Rosa Parks, while she was staying at the New Orleans Marriott. His commitment to follow in Homer Plessy’s footsteps as a civic activist was cemented by what Parks said to him that day: “Your name is Plessy—you got work to do.”

The Plessy & Ferguson Initiative was founded in 2009 by two descendants of the opposing parties in Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in the United States. The organization’s work focuses on civil rights history, memorialization, and transitional justice.