Reflections on the Civil Rights Movement as told by two of New Orleans’ HBCU presidents
8th February 2021 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
In many ways, Dr. Norman C. Francis embodies both the wealth of potential found at HBCUs in the United States, as well as the fertile ground for social justice and individual achievement found in New Orleans.
For Francis, those two powerful forces – education at traditionally Black colleges and civil rights in the Crescent City – merged in his own personal experience at Xavier University.
Now 89, Francis can look back at his life and the way it intersected with local history and be proud of his own individual accomplishments as well as the accomplishments made by his generation of change-makers.
He can also see how much he and his fellow early-generation civil rights advocates have passed the torch of social justice and racial equality to successive generations of activists, educators, political leaders and other proponents of change.
“At the time I started at Xavier as a freshman, the Civil Rights Movement was taking place,” Francis told The Louisiana Weekly in a recent interview. “A lot of people knew this was the beginning of the end of segregation. It was coming.”
Francis said his own story is, in a way, representative of the American Dream that for so many decades and centuries was denied to people of color but by the mid-20th century was slowly being opened to African Americans. “It was a change that as a people, Black people had doors open for them,” Francis said. “All we needed to do was walk through them and show what we could do.”
Current Xavier President Dr. C. Reynold Verret told The Louisiana Weekly that the Civil Rights Movement, including Dr. Francis’ work, has led to this moment and has taken American society to a new era of understanding and the redefinition of what it means to be American.
Verret said that the societal reckoning that’s occurred since the blossoming of the Black Lives Matter movement and the evolution of social justice protests nationwide in the wake of so many killings of Black citizens by law enforcement officers has heavily involved confronting and revising so many “false narratives” about where this country came from, how it developed, and to whom it belongs.
“History is created to justify history as ‘the way it is,’” Verret said. “But the false narratives are beginning to be reconstructed, and this is the beginning of that conversation. This is an important moment of truth telling.
“All that is part of becoming,” he added. “We’re an unfinished project, and part of that project is becoming a better community and becoming better people and telling the truth about our common history.”
As for Francis himself, his journey has been a long, winding one. A native of Lafayette, he graduated from high school and arrived as a freshman at Xavier’s New Orleans campus in 1948. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1952 before becoming the first African American admitted to the Loyola University of New Orleans School of Law.
He earned his doctoral law degree from Loyola in 1955, and after a stint in the Army and several years as a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney’s Office working to integrate federal agencies, Francis returned to his first alma mater for what he thought was a two-year stint as Xavier’s dean of freshmen.
“But,” he said, “those two years became 47 years.”
After serving as dean, Francis rose through the ranks of Xavier’s administration until, in 1968, he became president of the university. In doing so, he became the first lay person, as well as the first Black and first male, to hold the prestigious position.
He served as Xavier’s president for the next 47 years, during which time he oversaw the education of thousands of young people. He also sent time on the boards of directors for numerous national educational foundations, was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served as the chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and, in 2006, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States.
Over the years, Francis has worked with and befriended numerous local progressive leaders in New Orleans, including A.P. Tureaud, who served as the attorney for the New Orleans NAACP during the Civil Rights Movement, to C.C. Dejoie and family, the founders and longtime owners of The Louisiana Weekly.
He was also close to Dutch Morial, a fellow Xavier grad who started out as an attorney and disciple of Tureaud before serving in the state Legislature and becoming the first Black mayor of New Orleans. Francis was also on the ground here in 1957, when the landmark charter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was written in New Orleans.
The capstone of Francis’ life and career came earlier this year, when the former Jefferson Davis Parkway in New Orleans was officially renamed the Norman F. Francis Parkway, a designation made particularly poignant by the fact that much of Xavier, a highly respected HBCU for nearly a century, is located on or near the street that for decades was named after the traitorous leader of the Confederacy – an entity dedicated to and built by slavery and human bondage.
During his many years at Xavier – first as a student, then as a dean, an administrator and as president – Francis always strove to be a part of the school’s fundamental mission of personal enrichment, racial advancement and social justice.
He and his fellow Xavierites, he said, “had the opportunities to put leadership in the community. They all came from programs that taught leadership. You name the field, we had produced leaders in them. [Xavier] was a place for me to see them walk across the stage [to receive their degrees] and show what they had.”
And, he added, “It’s absolutely important that we keep it going.”
Verret noted that Francis’ career was full of game-changing progress in the field of law in New Orleans that included integrating a law school, representing civil rights leaders as their attorneys, and educating future attorneys and legal professionals.
“Norman Francis by his career reshaped the law in Louisiana,” Verret said. He added that Francis “was doing a lot of yeoman’s work [toward social justice],” efforts made even more important because Francis did it after being educated here. “This is one of our sons,” Verret said.
Verret said that in the wake of the tumultuous, trying year that was 2020, our present and our future remain to be written, but only if we acknowledge the truths of a deeply problematic past and reconcile them with our views of modern America. With education as a foundation, he said, “[t]hat is the challenge we’re facing now.”
“We should be somewhat humble,” he said. “We aren’t pushing the illusion that we are a perfect society. That’s a very dangerous thing.”
He added that “[i]t’s about speaking very frankly and not shying away from those conversations.”
Francis said that the current situation in America – the reluctance of some to acknowledge our sometimes ugly history, the political and social divisiveness, the onslaught of misinformation, the lack of trust in the system and in each other – requires that progressive educators and community leaders not lose faith and become discouraged. Our eyes must stay on the prize.
“Our responsibilities are to move us forward and bring everyone else with us and help the country to be what it was supposed to be,” he said. “We need to get leaders of the future, because the future is now.”
This article originally published in the February 8, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
