Dr. Rudolph J. Lombard changed lives and America

22nd December 2014   ·   0 Comments

By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer

“Rudy was a doer,” Don Hubbard says matter of factly. “Rudy was a doer; Oretha Castle was a doer…she wasn’t Oretha Castle Haley, then. They started the local CORE chapter,” he adds. Hubbard was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) along with Jerome Smith, Matthew Suarez, Doretha Smith-Simmons, Dave Dennis, Cecil Carter, George Raymond, and a host of other 20-somethings ready to sacrifice their lives to stop segregation and racial inequality.

The occasion for his words was both somber and inspiring. Hubbard’s fellow CORE alumnus had “gone to be with the ancestors,” as civil rights attorney Ernest Jones said in an email.

Dr. Rudolph Joseph Lombard 75, passed away Saturday, December 13, at high noon. Born during the Jim Crow era, the New Orleans native grew up in Algiers. He played basketball at Xavier Prep but he was a nerd before there was such a thing. He had a strong work ethic, too.

He worked as a longshoreman, while earning a degree in business administration from Xavier University in 1961. It was on the river, as a member of the union, that he learned about organizing and coalition-building, skills that he would use in CORE, as its logistics director for CORE’s Freedom Rides and national vice chairman.

“Rudy had an insatiable appetite for reading, and I was there to soak up everything I could,” says Appellate Court Judge Edwin Lombard, Rudy’s youngest brother. Rudy was the eldest. The middle brother, the late “Coach” Roland Lombard, was Lawless High School’s famed football and track coach. Ed Lombard remembers reading the Spook That Sat by the Door and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and other books that Rudy left for him.

Lombard‘s place in civil rights history is absolute. He staged sit-ins at Canal Street’s whites-only lunch counters, McCrory’s, for example, and withstood the venomous attacks from whites who had yet to concede that the south lost the Civil War. Lombard was fearless and never one to give up or quit. After being told not to stage any more sit-ins, Lombard organized another boycott, the very next week. CORE members were arrested for felony mischief, when they were only exercising their first amendment rights.

According to Hubbard, CORE members organized in Bogalusa, Plaquemines Parish, and all across Louisiana and Mississippi. With the ink barely dry on his college diploma, Lombard went full tilt into the 1961 Freedom Rides. “We were everywhere,” explains Hubbard, who drove the brand new 1963 Ford Fairlane Station Wagon from New York in 1964, down to Mississippi and “handed the keys over to Mississippian James Earl Chaney.”

Chaney and two white CORE volunteers, Swerner and Good-man would be found murdered, for trying to register people to vote. What the CORE youth endured in trying to end segregation makes today’s police brutality protests look like a picnic.

Lombard fought his conviction all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lombard v. State of Louisiana and won. His case was one of five landmark cases that desegregated public accommodations, governments, and private businesses.

Lombard went beyond civil rights activism, he fought for voting rights, economic equality, better medical treatment for African Americans and where ever there was injustice, and there was Rudy front and center. From 1962-63, Lombard organized voter registration drives in New Orleans, Louisiana, Florida, Boston, and Syracuse….before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

He not only talked the talk but he walked the walk. He was a standard-bearer. Lombard created synergy around issues; created movements. Time after time and decade after decade, he took the lead in addressing inequities. He saw a need and addressed it, whether civil rights, economic and cultural empowerment or public health. And through it all, he continued get more and more formal education. . In 1963, Lombard earned a master’s degree in social science and a PhD in Urban Studies from Syracuse University.

Over the next decade, Lombard again saw a need and created an institution. This time he became the founding executive director of the Howard University Institute of Drug Abuse and Addiction, where he opened up the University’s Freedom Hospital and clinics in Washington, D.C. to fight against the “scourge” in African-American communities.

It was during a time when crack cocaine, heroin, angel dust, and other deadly drugs were imported into impoverished African-American communities and bringing with them high incidences of AIDS. The drugs acted as a vehicle for escaping the reality of racism and economic oppression that permeated the halls of government and corporate board rooms.

Lombard returned home to work on the Claiborne Avenue Design Team, which created a plan for reciprocity…a way to right the injustice perpetrated on Treme’s African-American community. Hundreds were displaced in a fit of eminent domain, to pave the way for the Interstate system, which ran straight through the once vibrant community that formed the core of Black Creole culture in the 20th century.

It was there that residents celebrated “Carnival Time” and Shove Tuesday (Mardi Gras Day). Picnicking under fine oak trees, neighbors barbecued and waited for the “Black Indians,” and costumed revelers—the Baby Dolls, Skeleton Men, and an assortment of characters. Then came the “second-line bands,” “social and pleasure clubs” and, finally, the Zulu Parade. Entrepreneurs sold homemade food and drinks and handcrafted items. All this during segregation. Then came the I-10. Today, the plan is considered to be what should and could be done to revitalize downtown’s Claiborne Avenue corridor.

Always deeply immersed in New Orleans’ culture, Lombard penned “The New Orleans Creole Feast, a definitive source of 300 recipes and featuring 15 chefs who are largely responsible for making New Orleans the food capital of the U.S.

Again, in 1975, Lombard saw a need and was compelled to address it. As co-founder of the New Orleans Neighborhood Develop­ment Foundation, Lombard witnessed at least 3,000 New Orleans families become homeowners, through the organization’s first-time homebuyers program.

But why weren’t African Americans involved in investment of public sector retirement systems or administering pension program, he must have wondered. So as a managing partner of Quantum/Gabelli, Lombard advocated for inclusion of minorities into this arena.

And yet again, this extraordinary visionary saw a need. When he first became ill with prostate cancer, he was compelled to act. It’s no secret that study upon study shows that African-Americans receive a different standard of treatment at the hands of white medical personnel. Lombard clearly saw this and determined that African-American men with prostate cancer needed a safety net, a coalition of survivors that could encourage and inform one another of best practices. To address this need, Lombard founded the Second Opinion Society. The SOS provided counseling services, held conferences, and established the annual Bio-Medical Symposium at Clark-Atlanta University.

Lombard also worked as a research associate at the Robert Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University in Chicago, and as a community outreach coordinator at the Walter Center for Urological Health at Northshore University in Evanston, Illinois.

Rudy Lombard was indeed a “doer,” but also a man that everyone interested in civil and human rights and justice should strive to emulate. Rudy is gone but his legacy, a lifetime of working to improve the lives of others, will stand in history, forever.

This article originally published in the December 22, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.