New Orleans HBCU graduates in the Modern Civil Rights Movement
15th March 2021 · 0 Comments
Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series focusing on some of the country’s iconic graduates of HBCUs and their accomplishments.
By C. C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
If there was ever such a thing as a modern day Underground Railroad, it would run through New Orleans. New Orleanians played and continue to play a pivotal role in the struggle for civil rights. This Black History Month article features New Orleans HBCU students who risked their lives to desegregate New Orleans and the Deep South.
The Rev. Abraham Lincoln “A. L.” Davis – Leland College
The Rev. Abraham Lincoln “A. L.” Davis was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the early days of SCLC, Davis served as vice president of the leadership conference when Dr. King was president. Davis organized sit‐ins and other nonviolent protests. During the 1960s, when SCLC was in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, Davis was pastor of the New Zion Baptist Church in New Orleans, a post he held until his death.
The Rev. Davis was the first Black person appointed to serve on the New Orleans City Council. The former Shakespeare Park is named in his honor. In 1961, New Orleans Mayor de Lesseps S. Morrison appointed Davis as the city’s first director of race relations. He was later named to Louisiana’s first Commission on Race Relations, Rights and Responsibilities. He also served as Chairman of several city agencies and political groups.
Dorothy Mae DeLavallade Taylor – Southern University and A&M College – Baton Rouge
Louisiana State Representative for District 20 (Orleans Parish) Dorothy Mae Taylor was a New Orleans educator, civil rights leader and politician. Taylor was the first African-American woman to be elected to and serve in the Louisiana House of Representatives.
She was also active in civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining more resources for facilities for African Americans in the city. In the late 1950s, she successfully petitioned the New Orleans Public Schools and the New Orleans Recreation Department to not provide equal resources to Blacks.
Prior to entering elected office, Taylor was a Head Start teacher and served as director of the Central City Neighborhood Health Clinic. In 1984, she was appointed by Governor Edwin Edwards as head of the state Department of Urban and Community Affairs. She was the first African-American woman to hold a cabinet position.
Taylor was a major proponent of criminal justice reform. She considered her efforts at penal reform to have been partially successful because she built a coalition among the courts, community organizations, the press and hundreds of volunteers to work toward humane treatment of the incarcerated.
In 1986, she was elected to one of two at-large positions on the New Orleans City Council. She was chosen as council president in 1987. Taylor was term-limited in 1994 but among the hallmarks of her city council career was her effort to desegregate the city’s Mardi Gras parade krewes.
Taylor’s 1992 ordinance required krewe captains to sign an affidavit certifying that they are not discriminating as a condition for obtaining a parade permit. She reasoned that if the parade krewes wanted to use city services to hold their parades, they could not discriminate on the basis of race. Back then, the krewes’ were composed of all-male and all-white prominent business leaders in New Orleans.
Alexander Pierre Tureaud, Sr. – Howard University Law School
A.P. Tureaud was a civil rights attorney for the New Orleans chapter of the NAACP.
When Tureaud was 19, he moved to Washington, D.C. Tureaud was a student of Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of Howard University Law School, and NAACP first special counsel or litigation director, and an associate of Thurgood Marshall, founder of the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund and the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
Tureaud became a junior clerk at the United States Department of Justice library. After graduation, he sat for and passed the District of Columbia bar exam and became a minute clerk for a D.C. judge, who was one of his former professors. In the 1930s, Tureaud joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc.
In 1941, Tureaud and Marshall successfully challenged the salary disparity between Black and white New Orleans teachers. Tureaud filed sixteen suits over seven years challenging the salary disparities throughout the state. In 1948, as a result of his litigation, the Louisiana state legislature adopted a minimum salary schedule for all teachers, regardless of race.
In 1946, Tureaud filed a lawsuit challenging Louisiana State University Law School’s policy of whites-only admission. There were no law schools in Louisiana that admitted Black students at the time, and so the legal team charged that the “separate but equal” requirement (established in the notorious Plessy case) was violated when there was no alternative option. The lawsuit was dismissed but the Louisiana Legislature allocated funding for a law division, which was opened at Southern University in 1947.
Tureaud, with the help of Marshall, launched a series of lawsuits in the 1940s and 1950s, including Willie Robinson v. LSU Board of Supervisors and Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, that resulted in the desegregation of Louisiana State University and the Orleans Parish School District.
In the 1950s, Tureaud was a founding member of the Louis Martinet Legal Society, a still-extant legal organization that addresses racial discrimination and civil rights violations in the state.
Today, a street, a housing authority building, a public school in New Orleans and a classroom building on the campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge all carry his name. There is also a statue of A.P. Tureaud at the beginning of A.P. Tureaud Street in the 7th ward.
Rudy Lombard – Xavier University
Rudy Lombard was a civil rights leader who worked to desegregate New Orleans businesses, register Black people to vote, promote Blacks’ right to unionize and participate in urban planning and pension funds.
Lombard and Oretha Castle Haley co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality’s New Orleans Chapter. At the time, Lombard was the National Vice President of the Congress of Racial Equality and also the senior class president at his college.
The famous case of Lombard v. Louisiana is named for Rudy Lombard. On September 17, 1960, at about 10:30 in the morning, four college students – Rudy Lombard, Cecil Carter, Oretha Castle Haley and Sydney Goldfinch – entered the McCrory Five and Ten Cent Store in New Orleans on Canal Street. They sat down at a refreshment counter at the back of the store and were refused service. This was after legal segregation was ended by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education. They were arrested, charged and found guilty of the Louisiana criminal mischief statute. Their convictions were affirmed by the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Civil rights attorneys Janet Mary Riley, Lolis Elie, John “Jack” Nelson and others, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of the United States. The reversal of the lower court’s decision was a major victory for the college students.
From 1962-63, Lombard organized voter registration drives in New Orleans, Florida, Boston, Mass., and Syracuse, N.Y.. In 1963, Lombard earned a master’s degree in social science and a doctorate in Urban Studies from Syracuse University.
A decade later, Lombard 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.
Lombard returned home to work on the Claiborne Avenue design team and in 1975, he co-founded the Neighborhood Development Foundation, a non-profit that provided counseling and access to financing for first-time homebuyers.
In 1978, Lombard co-authored “Creole Feast: 15 Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets” with Nathaniel Burton, and took New Orleans chefs on a cooking tour across the U.S. He later opened Lombard’s, a restaurant in downtown Oakland.
When Lombard became ill with prostate cancer, he founded the Second Opinion Society, to ensure that African-American men had access to the best healthcare. 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, where he coordinated health forums and screenings to give African Americans and Latinos access to cancer information and care.
Jerome “Big Duck” Smith – Southern University in New Orleans
In 1960, Jerome Smith, 21, joined civil rights marches and sat in at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Arrested for trying to desegregate a McCrory’s lunch counter, he spent a month in the parish jail. He became an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality.
As a member of CORE, Smith had been beaten and jailed in Mississippi during the Freedom Rides. He nearly lost his life. He still suffers today from beatings he endured at the hands of racist whites in McComb, Miss., in November 1961, while testing whether public bus stations, restaurants and waiting rooms were complying with desegregation laws. He was beaten with brass knuckles, sticks and fists. Smith would later say that his friend, George Raymond, intervened and saved his life.
In spring 1963, Smith was in New York City getting treatment for those injuries at Lenox Hill Hospital when he was asked to join other activists at an impromptu event being organized by writer James Baldwin. The group was to meet May 24 to discuss civil rights with Robert F. Kennedy. He gave Kennedy a mouthful about the complacency of the Kennedy administration and the lack of protection afforded the Freedom Riders.
Smith returned to New Orleans and founded Tambourine & Fan, a non-profit organization that organized and hosted sports and culture events for New Orleans youth. He also founded the Treme Center, which teaches children about non-violence and the Civil Rights Movement, and Black pride. The Center also offers extracurricular activities for children, sports, arts and cultural activities.
Oretha Castle Haley and Doris Jean Castle – Southern University in New Orleans
Oretha Castle Haley was a pivotal leader of the youth contingency of the Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans. She challenged segregated facilities and promoted voter registration in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, all while facing arrest and physical violence. Haley was a student at Southern University when she participated in a boycott and protests organized by the Consumers’ League of Greater New Orleans in response to the racially discriminatory employment practices of Dryades Street merchants.
In 1960, Oretha Castle became a founding member of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and served as president of the chapter from 1961 through 1964. She actively participated in sit-ins, protests and demonstrations around the city.
Her arrest, along with that of three other activists, Rudy Lombard, Cecil Carter and Sydney Goldfinch, for staging a sit-in at McCrory’s lunch counter on Canal Street, was the basis of Lombard v. Louisiana. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963, which overturned their arrests and led to the desegregation of retail stores in New Orleans.
Her sister Doris joined CORE and also became a Freedom Rider and she joined in the desegregation demonstrations. Their parents’ home became known as the “Freedom House.” Much of the planning took place at the Castles’ kitchen table at 917 North Tonti Street. Their mother, Virgie Castle, worked as a bartender and restaurant server at Dooky Chase Restaurant.
In 1964, Oretha Castle served as a CORE field secretary in Monroe, La., where she conducted voter registration drives. She also helped to organize the court case that desegregated Charity Hospital in New Orleans, for which her grandmother Callie Castle served as a plaintiff.
In the 1980s, Haley served as deputy administrator of Charity Hospital, organized the New Orleans Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation and worked on the political campaigns of African American politicians, including Dorothy Mae Taylor. In 1989, the commercial district of Dryades Street between Philip and Calliope streets was renamed Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard.
Cecil Winston Carter Jr. – Dillard University
Cecil Carter Jr. was a civil rights activist and CORE member. He participated in the sit-ins that led to the desegregation of Canal Street stores. He later worked at the Urban League of Greater New Orleans in many capacities and was deputy director of the mayor’s Human Relations Committee during Moon Landrieu’s administration.
David J. Dennis – Dillard University
Dave Dennis was a civil rights activist who participated in CORE’s Woolworth sit-in and the Freedom rides. He later became a pivotal organizer for CORE.
Dennis got involved in the Civil Rights Movement after meeting Doris Castle. The sit-in at Woolworth was the first of his 30 arrests relative to the Civil Rights Movement.
He worked closely with both Bob Moses and Medgar Evers as well as members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He worked as co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), as director of Mississippi’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and as one of the organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
He co-organized numerous sit-ins and demonstrations in New Orleans, Shreveport and Baton Rouge in Louisiana and in Hattiesburg, Clarksdale, Canton and Jackson in Mississippi. Dennis also helped to organize a challenge to the Mississippi Democratic Party at the 1964 National Democratic Convention and also to the Louisiana Democratic Party at 1972 National Democratic Convention.
Leaving Mississippi, Dennis attended the University of Michigan Law School, received a Juris Doctor degree, and eventually opened up his own law firm in Lafayette, La., named David J. Dennis Law Firm.
He later joined the Algebra Project, a nonprofit organization run by Bob Moses that aims to improve the mathematics education for minority children.
The Louisiana Weekly offers a debt of gratitude to all of the young HBCU graduates in New Orleans, specifically, as well as the other brave youth, in general, who fueled the modern Civil Rights Movement and risked their lives to end segregation in the Deep South.
The members of the New Orleans CORE Chapter included Rudy Lombard and Joyce Taylor of Xavier, Oretha Castle, Julia Aaron, Ruth D’aspenza, William Harper and Jerome Smith of SUNO; David Dennis and Archie Allen of Dillard; Lenny Goldfinch, William Harrell and Hugh Murray of Tulane; Doris Castle, Doratha “Dodie” Smith-Simmons, Matt “Flukie” Suarez, Isaac Reynolds, George Raymond, Thomas Valentine, Don Hubbard, Sandra Nixon-Thomas, sisters Patricia and Carlene Smith, Betty Daniels, George Raymond, Margaret Leonard, the three Thompson sisters: Jean, Alice and Shirley, Claude Reese.
This article originally published in the March 8, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
