Lousiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced Wednesday that he was signing a posthumous pardon for Homer A. Plessy, the plaintiff in the landmark 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.

Plessy was arrested in 1892 for deliberately violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890, which required “separate but equal” train car accommodations for Blacks and whites. His case reached the Supreme Court four years later, where a 7-1 majority ruled against Plessy, writing that the separate train car accommodations were not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. The “separate but equal” doctrine ruled for six decades until being severely weakened by the court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“The first six decades of the 21st century should have been filled with infinitely more promise and progress in race relations, and they would have been had slavery and segregation given way to equality and freedom as a plain reading of the 13th and 14th Amendments required,” Governor Edwards said in a statement. “Instead, the 1896 Plessy decision ordained segregation for the explicit purpose of declaring and perpetuating white supremacy, as immoral and factually erroneous as that was —and is.”

Plessy’s violation of the Separate Car Act of 1890 was deliberate; he was put forward as a test case by the multiracial Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens). His action was also supported by the railroad from which bought his ticket, as the law would require them to buy additional train cars. The Comité chose Plessy due to his racial lineage. He was fair-skinned and had predominantly white ancestry, but was classified as a Black man under Lousiana law. He was arrested after he sat in a white designated car and refused to leave when asked.

In ruling against him, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause provided legal equality to all races but was not necessarily intended to prevent other types of discrimination. The lone dissent came from Justice John Marshall Harlan, who wrote that the law was passed with the intention of excluding Black passengers, adding that “[n]o one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary.”

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Plessy’s case was returned to district criminal court, where he was found guilty. He paid the $25 fine and lived an otherwise quiet life afterward until he died in 1925. Almost a century later, an application was submitted to the Louisiana Board of Pardons by Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams, the same office that sought Plessy’s conviction.

Governor Edwards was joined at the ceremony by Williams, several local officials, civil rights leaders, Southern University law professor Angela Bell and several of the descendants of Plessy, Judge John Ferguson and Justice Harlan.