Education in Louisiana .us

Education in Louisiana

Prepared for: State of Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Office of Cultural Development Division of Historic Preservation

Prepared by: Laura Ewen Blokker Southeast Preservation Greensburg, Louisiana lblokker@sepreservation

May 15, 2012

On the cover: (Clockwise from top left) Bossier City High School, Bossier City, Bossier Parish; St. Matthew High School, Melrose vicinity, Natchitoches Parish; Moreauville High School, Moreauville, Avoyelles Parish; Ursuline Convent, New Orleans, Orleans Parish; Brister School House, Sikes vicinity, Winn Parish; St. Paul Baptist Church/ Morehead School, Kinder vicinity, Allen Parish; Goudeau School, Goudeau, Avoyelles Parish; Longstreet Rosenwald School, Longstreet, DeSoto Parish; Goudeau School, Goudeau, Avoyelles Parish. (In the center) McNutt School, Boyce vicinity, Rapides Parish. All photographs by Laura Ewen Blokker.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary/ Statement of Historic Context ....................................................1 Background History and Development

Education in the French and Spanish Colonial Periods, 1699-1802...........................3 The American Push for Public Education, 1803-1832..........................................6 Private and Public Ventures, 1833-1861.........................................................11 War, Reconstruction, and Regression, 1862-1897..............................................16 Separate and Unequal, 1898-1965................................................................23 Associated Property Types..................................................................................34 Schools and Associated Buildings................................................................35

Colonial.....................................................................................36 Antebellum.................................................................................37 Civil War and Reconstruction, 1862-1877.............................................39 Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1878-1965

Catholic..............................................................................42 Protestant...........................................................................43 Private Non-Denominational....................................................44 Public and Quasi-Public

African American........................................................44 White......................................................................53 Integrated.................................................................60 Special Education Schools.......................................................61 Homes of Educators................................................................................61 Libraries..............................................................................................62 School Board Buildings............................................................................63 Other..................................................................................................64 Geographical Data...........................................................................................64

Summary of Identification and Evaluation Methods....................................................64 Illustration Credits...........................................................................................65 Major Bibliographical References.........................................................................66

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/ STATEMENT OF HISTORIC CONTEXT

The purpose of this historic context is to provide a basis for evaluating the historical significance and National Register eligibility of resources throughout the state of Louisiana related to primary and secondary education. The temporal scope of this context is 1699-1965. This time span begins with the settlement of Louisiana by French colonists and ends in the midst of Louisiana's ten year process of school desegregation. This termination date was selected to ensure that this context will include all resources reaching at least fifty years of age for the next few years. Because the lines between secondary and higher education were often blurred during the past three centuries and secondary schools sometimes evolved into institutes of higher learning, higher learning is mentioned where it is necessary to adequately explain the events of primary and secondary education. The geographic limitations of the context are the boundaries of the state of Louisiana.

Histories of education in Louisiana often characterize the citizenry as disinterested in providing for a public education system from the very beginning of colonization. There is a certain truth to this that very much effected the development of schools in Louisiana, but it should not be imagined that the people of Louisiana did not educate their children. Merely, it should be understood that over the past three hundred years, education took a different course in Louisiana than in other states of the nation. Sometimes this path was well in advance of its peers, and sometimes it fell behind.

A quick recap of almost three hundred years of education in a state that has been so maligned for ignorance and poor schools holds some surprising highlights. Girls have been receiving a quality education in Louisiana for 285 years. Among the first people to receive a formal education in Colonial Louisiana were Native Americans and enslaved African American women. In 1805, Louisiana enacted a school system plan that was only the third of its kind in the nation, and alone in providing for the education of girls. By 1845, the public school system of New Orleans' Second Municipality was a national model, with innovations unknown even in Boston's celebrated education scheme. In 1871, New Orleans schools became the first in the South and among just a handful in the nation to racially integrate. Of course, where there are highs, there are inevitably corresponding lows, and the era of Jim Crow was surely the deepest of nadirs for Louisiana's schools. In 1960, the hatred that had so severely hindered education in the state was displayed on national television as New Orleans schools integrated for the second time in their history.

Many aspects of life in Louisiana have been shaped by the state's origins in French and Spanish colonization and education is no exception. As one scholar of American education explains, national differences in colonial policies resulted in "sharp variations in educational practices among the different regions of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, in the nineteenth century, differences among the states."1 It is also useful to study education as a cultural tradition, not just a public policy. When Europeans first started settling in North America, their concepts of education were inseparably paired with religion. Whether they were Catholic or Protestant, for seventeenth and early eighteenth-century colonists, school and religious instruction went hand in hand. As Catholics, colonists of Louisiana embraced Catholic instruction. The entrance of Acadians into Louisiana reinforced the importance placed on the

1 Joel Spring, The American School 1642-1900. 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1990), 13.

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