Author, Civil Rights Activist. He is remembered as an American author who fought with pen and his voice against the social injustices that were received by the newly freed African Americans during the Reconstruction Era in the South. He is best known for supporting Homer Plessy in his court case. Plessy, a 30-year-old who was 7/8 Caucasian, was arrested in 1892 under the Louisiana Train Car Act, which assigned traveling cars depending on the color of passenger's skin. Plessy had purchased a first-class train ticket, but when the conductor asked him his race, he replied “Colored.” He was ordered to go to the “Colored Only” car, but refused as he had assessed that car was not equal to his first class ticket accommodations. According to the Train Car Act, the train was to offer “Separate but Equal” accommodations. At this point, Plessy was thrown off the train, arrested, spent the night in jail, had to post bail and then appear in criminal court before Judge John Howard Ferguson. Plessy, a shoemaker, needed legal representation. Besides Desdunes, many supporters rallied to help fight his court case including several former Union soldiers, writers and artists, and a few politicians. Desdunes' oldest son, Daniel, had been arrested some months earlier for the same reason, but was acquitted by Judge Ferguson since his train, traveled through Louisiana going to other states not having a Train Car Act, whereas Plessy's train was traveling between stops within the state. Eventually in 1896, the case reached the United States Supreme Court with Plessy losing the case, thus having to pay the $25 fee for refusing to go to the “Colored Only” car. The Federal Supreme Court's decision was made that the accommodations on the train for both white and the colored were said “to be separate but equal,” thus not unconstitutional. The ruling established a solid start of the Jim Crow era and legalizing apartheid in the United States. The ruling stood from 1896 until the Federal Supreme Court's historical Brown vs Board of Education ruling in 1954. Although he published articles during the four-year wait for the Federal Supreme Court trial, neither he nor Plessy became involved again in a legal or political activity fighting against segregation after this loss. Born a free person of color, his father, Pierre Jeremie Desdunes, was of Haitian ancestry, and his mother, Herniette, was Cuban. His family grew tobacco and made cigars, which he started to smoke at an young age. In the early 1870s, he studied law at the historically Black college, Straight University, then held a position at intervals between 1879 to 1912 at the United States Customs House in New Orleans. The social norm of the time was segregation according to race. Early in his life, he taught at The Institue Catholique, teaching African-American orphans. As part of the out-numbered state militia, he fought at the three-day Battle of Liberty Place against an organized group of paramilitary ex-Confederate soldiers, numbering in a mass of five thousand from the Democratic Political Party, who overran the State Capital in New Orleans disagreeing with the 1872 governor's election results. From this experience, he received battle wounds. He became very active in the Republican Political Party. In 1889 he was the editor of the “Crusader,” a weekly newspaper for the African American community, which was printed in French as well as English with the mission to rally the community against the encroaching segregation state laws such as inferior educational offerings and later poll taxes. Besides French and English, he spoke Creole and translated many French authors' work into English for his community. He authored “Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits,” which was published in French in 1911 in Quebec, Canada . The book gave biographies of the prominent Creole men in New Orleans. Returning in 1911 to his position at the New Orleans Customs House, he was supervising the weighing of cargo on a ship when granite dust accidentally blew in his eyes leaving him, eventually over seventeen years, total blind. With his altered vision, he had to retire in 1912. After relocating to Nebraska with his son's family, he wrote poetry to honor African American soldiers who had served in World War I, and he was called “Omaha's Blind Negro Poet” in the newspaper the “Omaha World-Herald” in 1917. An avid cigar smoker for most of his life, he died at home after battling cancer of the larynx. After 1870, he married Mathilde Cheva; the couple had five children, and it is well-documented he fathered at least seven other children. His body was returned to New Orleans for burial.