Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 9

2. Minnesota, Civil Rights Committee, Address of the Minnesota Civil Rights Committee to the American Public (St. Paul, MN: The Appeal, [1891?]). (8 p.)

Report of a committee of African Americans living in Minnesota in which they describe their effort to challenge the constitutionality of segregated coach laws that had recently been passed by legislatures in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The committee reports that it has decided to use S. E. Hardy’s suit against a railroad in Tennessee as a test case. (Hardy, an African American from St. Paul, had been forcibly ejected from the first class coach for which he had bought a ticket when the train crossed the state line into Tennessee.) The committee concludes their report with a request for donations to support their challenge of the Tennessee statute requiring separate accommodations on interstate transportation. (The Supreme Court rendered its decision regarding Plessey vs. Ferguson in 1896.)