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E. J. Edmunds, School Integration, and White Supremacist Backlash in Reconstruction New Orleans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2019

Sian Zelbo
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Abstract

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a “negro” as a teacher of “white youths.” Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual elite in exercising the political power they held under Radical Reconstruction to strip racial designations from public schools. White supremacist Redeemers responded with a vicious propaganda campaign to define, differentiate, and diminish the “negro race.” Edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in the New Orleans public schools first as a student and then as a teacher, and the details of his life show the impact on ordinary Afro-Creoles as the city's warring politicians used the public schools both to undermine and reinforce the racial order.

Keywords

African American educationRedeemersschool desegregationSouthern schoolsurban schoolscivil rights movements
Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 379 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © History of Education Society 2019 

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References

1 “Our Public Schools,” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Sept. 18, 1875, 2.

2 “The Boys’ Central High School,” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 14, 1875, 1.

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4 A word about racial terminology: Modern scholars find race to be a cultural construct, and in fact this paper helps to show how the meanings of terms like “black” and “white” are constructed and used to oppress. This paper uses these terms to describe people who would have likely been identified that way by their contemporaries, even though they may have been of mixed European and African heritage.

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9 Henry Louis Gates Jr. analyzed the campaign to define “who, and what, a black person actually was,” and called it a “brutally effective” form of propaganda. Gates, Henry L. Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 4–5Google Scholar.

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23 This is consistent with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s argument that propaganda to define and belittle the black race may have been worse in places with large black populations because it shows how the white minority reestablished a clear hierarchy. Gates, Stony the Road, 14.

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25 Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” 8–9.

26 Harlan, “Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools,” 673–74.

27 Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” 29.

28 US Census Bureau, Eighth Census of the United States: 1860: Population, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, City of New Orleans, Ward 6 (Washington, DC: National Archives Mircofilm Publications, n.d.), M653_419, 141–42.

29 US Census Bureau, Eighth Census, M653_419, 139–46.

30 US Census Bureau, Eighth Census, M653_419, 142–43.

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33 The family members are marked as mulatto, for example, in the 1870 census. US Census Bureau, Ninth Census of the United States: 1870: Population, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, City of New Orleans, Ward 7 (Washington, DC: National Archives Mircofilm Publications, n.d.), M593_522, 540A. They would be deemed white again in later censuses.

34 Soards’ New Orleans City Directory (New Orleans: Soards Directory Company, 1897), 291Google Scholar.

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36 Succession of Edgar Edmunds (May 4, 1897), Civil District Court (Orleans Parish), Louisiana, docket no. 53348, New Orleans Public Library, Louisiana Division/City Archives.

37 Birth Record for Edgar Joseph Edmunds.

38 “Reprehensible If True,” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Sept. 18, 1875, 2 (Presbyterian pastor complaining that the black community recognizes these unions, which he calls criminal). Children of plaçage unions, unlike “illegitimate” children, were recognized both legally and by the Church, and they could, and often did, inherit property. Joan M. Martin, “Plaçage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre,” in Kein, Creole, 68.

39 Family relations were not always documented clearly among Afro-Creoles, but various documents tie E. J. Edmunds to Prosper Foy's family through his mother. One is an obituary of his uncle, Florville Foy. “Florville Foy, the Oldest Marble Cutter in Old New Orleans, Dies, in the House He Has Occupied for Sixty Years, Attended by His Former Slaves,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), March 17, 1903, 10.

40 Baptismal record of René Prosper Foy (1787). Paroisse Saint-Paul, Baptêmes, Mariages, Sépultures, Archives of the Department of Loiret, France, https://www.archives-loiret.fr

41 US Census Bureau, Sixth Census of the United States: 1840: Population, Louisiana, St. James Parish, Right Bank of the Mississippi (Washington, DC: National Archives Mircofilm Publications, n.d.), M704_135, 265; US Census Bureau, Seventh Census of the United States: 1850: Population, Louisiana, St. James Parish, Eastern District (Washington, DC: National Archives Mircofilm Publications, n.d.), M432_239, 206A.

42 US Census Bureau, Ninth Census, M593_522, 541B.

43 A study of black slave owners lists Zélie Aubry (here called “Zelia Obry”) as one of New Orleans slave-owning free persons of color. It locates her residence as “Between Bayou Road and L'Amour Street” in Trémé. Woodson, Carter G., ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Washington, DC: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1924), 9Google Scholar.

44 See for example, Prosper Foy Papers, 1790–1878, box 1, vol. 1, doc. 19, Manuscripts Collection 443, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (hereafter cited at Foy Papers).

45 Foy Papers, box 1, vol. 1, docs. 58, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 86, 87, 88.

46 See, for example, Foy Papers, box 1, vol. 1, doc. 18.

47 See, for example, Birth Record for Olivia Edmunds, April 6, 1859, filed on April 19, 1864, New Orleans, Louisiana Birth Records Index, 1790–1899, vol. 30, 403, Vital Records Indices, Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge, LA; Minors of Zelie Aubry (1868) Orleans Parish, Louisiana, Probate Court, 1805–1846; and Succession of Edgar Edmunds (May 4, 1897).

48 Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” 21. See also Stern, Walter, Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), 23Google Scholar (talking about the social and racial “flux” of early New Orleans). This is consistent with the portrait of the Tinchant brothers in New Orleans. They ran businesses and were actively integrated in society, and yet Édouard was expelled from a streetcar because of his color. What is perhaps most interesting about the streetcar incident is that it seems to have been an unexpected humiliation for him to be treated that way. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 116.

49 Stern, Race and Education, 24.

50 Foy Papers, box 1, vol. 1, docs. 18, 19, 33.

51 Foy Papers, box 1, vol. 1, doc. 2.

52 “Florville Foy, the Oldest Marble Cutter in Old New Orleans.”

53 Record of Tax Assessments in New Orleans (1865–1872), Record of Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Washington, DC: National Archives Mircofilm Publications, n.d.), M1026_11.

54 Minors of Zelie Aubry (1868).

55 US Census Bureau, Eighth Census, M653_419, 141–142.

56 It was not yet the norm at this point even for white children to attend school. The state superintendent's 1861 report to the state legislature recorded that among New Orleans's four school districts, a total of 16,862 children attended public schools that year, and 19,452 were “not attending.” In the Second District—the school district for the French-speaking part of the city where the Edmunds family lived—less than one third of children attended public schools. Few private schools were reported in any of the districts. Louisiana Department of Education, Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Education to the Legislature of the State of Louisiana (Baton Rouge, LA: JM Taylor, 1861), 59–63Google Scholar, http://www2.state.lib.la.us/doeafsr/1861.pdf.

57 Mitchell, Raising Freedom's Child, 198; and DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 66 (discussing political measures to starve black schools of funding).

58 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 66.

59 See Foner, Reconstruction, 101 (stating that free blacks were reluctant to send their children to Freedmen's schools). James Anderson cites the Pioneer School of Freedom (1860) as an early example of schools started by “slaves and free persons of color.” (Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 7). This particular school educated slaves who had a pass to move around the city on their own for part of the day. “Dispensing and Acquiring Knowledge ‘Under Difficulties.’ The Pioneer School,” L'Union (New Orleans, LA), July 12, 1864, 3.

60 Hyde, Sarah L., Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 7–45Google Scholar.

61 For a discussion of prewar education for the city's free blacks, see Stern, Race and Education in New Orleans, 31–39. The one large, well-organized black school at this time and the only one listed in the 1861 city directory was the historically important Couvent School, nominally a school for indigent orphans, in which the Afro-Creole elite taught free black children of all backgrounds.

62 Marcus Christian claims that these secular, prewar Afro-Creole schools were the fruit of the Catholic Church's long tradition of black education. Marcus Christian, “The Negro in Louisiana” [unpublished manuscript], Marcus Christian Collection, Louisiana Digital Library, University of New Orleans, Ch. 20, http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/uno-p15140coll42%3A49.

63 An article from Harper's Magazine from 1866 praised the Couvent School as having some pupils who “have mastered the principal rules in arithmetic, and progressed as far as square and cube roots,” an impressive feat but would not have been sufficient to take the test for the École Polytechnique, which required, among other advanced topics, a basic knowledge of calculus. Willey, Nathan, “Education of the Colored Population of Louisiana,” Harper's Magazine 33, no. 194 (July 1866), 248Google Scholar.

64 Willey, “Education of the Colored Population of Louisiana,” 247.

65 Willey, “Education of the Colored Population of Louisiana,” 247.

66 Willey, “Education of the Colored Population of Louisiana,” 246.

67 Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership,” 433; and Christian, “The Negro in Louisiana,” Ch. 20.

68 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 65.

69 A study of black leaders during Reconstruction found that nearly all were free before the war. It included many mixed-race elites from the Afro-Creole community, but a full one-third of the men lived outside the French-speaking neighborhoods, and the movement included men who came to New Orleans from elsewhere in the South. Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership.”

70 Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership,” 428.

71 “The Star Car Question,” New Orleans Republican, May 1, 1867, 1.

72 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 65.

73 Thomas W. Conway, “The School Question,” New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 20, 1867, 4.

74 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 44.

75 “The Convention and the German Gazette,” New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 28, 1867, 4.

76 First Reconstruction Act of 1867, 14 Stat. 428–430, c. 153 (March 2, 1867), sec. 5.

77 In the same spring, South Carolina drafted and later ratified a similar constitution with a school integration clause.

78 Louisiana Const. of 1868, title II.

79 “The Great Issue,” New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 15, 1867, 4.

80 Louisiana Const. of 1868, title VII, art. 135.

81 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 67–70.

82 “Public School Examination,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), June 20, 1867, 8; and “Public School Examinations,” New Orleans Republican, June 25, 1868, 1.

83 “The Central High School. Commencement Exercises,” New Orleans Republican, Dec. 18, 1872, 1.

84 “Board of School Directors.”

85 For example, see Stern, Race and Education, 43–44; Mitchell, “Raising Freedom's Child,” 215–16; and Mishio Yamanaka, “Erasing the Color Line: The Racial Formation of Creoles of Color and the Public School Integration Movement in New Orleans, 1867–1880” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013), 22–24.

86 “Local intelligence,” New Orleans Crescent, May 28, 1868, 1; and “Board of School Directors.”

87 “Public School Examinations.”

88 “Board of School Directors.”

89 “Local intelligence”; and “Board of School Directors.”

90 The Louisiana Secretary of State has two birth certificates for Olivia Edmunds. The first, when she was five years old, listed her father, Edgar Edmunds, as a “free man of color” and her mother, Rose Euphémie Foy, as a “free woman of color.” Birth Record for Olivia Edmunds. The new certificate, filed four years later, lists Olivia's parents without the racial designations. Birth Record for Olivia Edmunds, April 6, 1859, filed May 26, 1868, New Orleans, Louisiana Birth Records Index, 1790–1899, vol. 47, 452, Vital Records Indices, Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge, LA.

91 Severin Latorre, the “duly commissioned and sworn recorder of births and deaths” who signed Olivia Edmunds's 1868 birth certificate, was indicated as a “f.m.c.” in several real-estate transfer records from before the war. See Chain of Title for 1227–1231 Burgundy Street (October 2, 1832 and June 1, 1843), Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey, The Historic New Orleans Collection, https://www.hnoc.org/vcs/property_info.php?lot=23171.

92 “Local Intelligence,” New Orleans Crescent, May 28, 1868, 1.

93 “Our Public Schools. Examinations Yesterday,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), June 23, 1870, 2.

94 “Our Public Schools. Examinations Yesterday.”

95 “Our Public Schools. Examinations Yesterday.”

96 “Public Schools Exhibitions,” New Orleans Republican, June 23, 1871, 1.

97 Birth Record for Edgar Joseph Edmunds.

98 “Report on the State of the Polytechnic School in Paris,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 4, no. 3 (Oct. 1841), 230Google Scholar.

99 M. Edmunds (Edgard Joseph), Concours d'Admission en 1871 [record of admission results], Collections École Polytechnique, Bibliothèque Centrale, Centre de Ressources Historiques (Palaiseau, France), file X2C 3 / 1871.

100 “Mixed Schools,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Jan. 12, 1871, 1.

101 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 69–70; Harlan, “Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools,” 675; Mitchell, Raising Freedom's Child, 216; Stern, Race and Education, 44; Vaughn, William P., Schools for All: The Blacks and Public Education in the South, 1865–1877 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 89Google Scholar; and Yamanaka, “Erasing the Color Line,” 22–24. Stern, Mitchell, and Yamanaka all refine earlier accounts by describing isolated incidents of integration before 1871. This study adds to prior scholarship by showing evidence of more widespread integration before 1871.

102 Harlan, “Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools,” 665; “Infamy Consummated,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Nov. 24, 1870, 1; and “The Courts,” New Orleans Republican, Dec. 21, 1870, 1.

103 Minutes, Jan. 9, 1875 to Feb. 7, 1877, Orleans Parish School Board, Louisiana Digital Library, University of New Orleans Collection, http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/uno-p15140coll4%3A4172.

104 “Mixed Schools.”

105 “Our Public Schools,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), June 23, 1871, 2.

106 Harlan, “Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools,” 675.

107 Cajori, Florian, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890)Google Scholar.

108 Group photo of students, circa 1871–1873, Collections École Polytechnique, Bibliothèque Centrale, Centre de Ressources Historiques (Palaiseau, France), file X2B 54 / 1871-72.

109 M. Edmunds, Classement Général de Fin d'Année, 1871 – 72 [school record from Edmunds first year], Collections École Polytechnique, Bibliothèque Centrale, Centre de Ressources Historiques (Palaiseau, France), file X2C 4 / 1872; M. Edmunds (Edgard Joseph), Rangs Obtenus Successivement [summary of school promotions], Collections École Polytechnique, Bibliothèque Centrale, Centre de Ressources Historiques (Palaiseau, France), file X2C 8 / 1871-1873.

110 Minutes, Jan. 9, 1875 to Feb. 7, 1877, Orleans Parish School Board, 7–8; and “City School Board: Reports, Communications and Resolutions,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), April 8, 1875, 2.

111 “City School Board.”

112 Foner, Reconstruction, 437.

113 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 280.

114 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 76.

115 Harlan, “Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools,” 672.

116 “The Color Line,” New Orleans Times, Dec. 15, 1874, 1.

117 “The Race Issue in the Schools,” New Orleans Bulletin, Dec. 15, 1874, 2.

118 “The Race Issue in the Schools.”

119 “The Color Line.”

120 “The Public Schools,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Dec. 16, 1874, 4.

121 “Youthful Knights,” New Orleans Times, Dec. 17, 1874, 2.

122 “The Race Issue in the Schools.”

123 “Mixed Schools,” New Orleans Bulletin, Dec. 12, 1874, 4.

124 Other terms included “blacks,” “gens de couleur,” “Creoles,” “griffes,” “briqués,” “mulattoes,” “quadroons,” and “octaroons.” Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” 3.

125 “Mixed Schools,” Dec. 12, 1874, 4.

126 “Was It a Conspiracy?” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Dec. 16, 1874, 4.

127 “The Public Schools.”

128 “Youthful Regulators,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Dec. 18, 1874, 1

129 “The Schools,” New Orleans Republican, Dec. 19, 1874, 2. The Catholic paper did not report on this incident but in the past had defended racial segregation in Catholic schools, writing that admitting a single black student to one of its schools would “ruin [the] institution”; and “Philosophical Law Suits,” Morning Star and Catholic Messenger (New Orleans), March 29, 1868, 4.

130 “The Schools.”

131 The Louisianan, later The Weekly Louisianan, was a Republican newspaper that was, according to its second-page masthead, “owned, edited and published by colored men.” It was founded by P. B. S. Pinchback. DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 70. William G. Brown, another prominent black leader, was editor and resigned in 1872 to become the state superintendent of education. “Our New Superientendent of Public Education.” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Jan. 4, 1873, 2.

132 “The Republican and ‘Mixed Schools.’” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Dec. 19, 1874, 2.

133 “The Race Issue in the Schools,” New Orleans Bulletin, Dec. 17, 1874, 2.

134 “The Lower Girls’ High School,” New Orleans Bulletin, Dec. 18, 1874, 2.

135 “The War Commenced,” New Orleans Bulletin, Dec. 18, 1874, 1; “The School Question,” New Orleans Bulletin, Dec. 19, 1874, 2; and “The Week,” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Dec. 26, 1874, 2.

136 “The Week”; and “The School Question.”

137 “The Week.”

138 “The War Commenced,” Dec. 18, 1874, 1; and “The School Question,” Dec. 19, 1874, 2.

139 “A Model(?) School Board,” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 19, 1875, 2 (identifies members by race and shows a black majority). Rankin identified four of the men as among New Orleans's “black leadership.” Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans,” 436–40.

140 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 138; and “Circular to the Republicans of Louisiana,” New Orleans Republican, March 31, 1868, 2.

141 School board minutes announced the results without reporting individual votes. The New Orleans Bulletin later questioned the board and reported that the vote was twelve to five, with three white members joining the black majority. “The Vote,” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 15, 1875, 1.

142 Minutes, Jan. 9, 1875 to Feb. 7, 1877, Orleans Parish School Board, 60.

143 “The Indignation Meeting,” New Orleans Republican, Sept. 30, 1875, 1.

144 Minutes, Jan. 9, 1875 to Feb. 7, 1877, Orleans Parish School Board, 27.

145 “Board of School Directors,” New Orleans Republican, Sept. 16, 1875, 1.

146 “Local Intelligence,” New Orleans Republican, Sept. 14, 1875, 3.

147 “Temporary Abandonment for the Sake of Reform,” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 17, 1875, 4.

148 “The Public Schools,” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 14, 1875, 4.

149 “Colored Teachers in White Schools,” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 19, 1875, 1.

150 “Temporary Abandonment for the Sake of Reform.”

151 “The Movement Against the City School Board,” New Orleans Bulletin, Oct. 9, 1875, 4.

152 “The Public Schools,” Sept. 14, 1875, 4.

153 “The Times vs. the Negro School Board,” New Orleans Times, Sept. 26, 1875, 4.

154 “The School Board's Experiment,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Sept. 18, 1875, 4.

155 “The School Excitement,” Morning Star and Catholic Messenger (New Orleans), Sept. 19, 1875, 4.

156 “The School Excitement.”

157 “Query?” New Orleans Bulletin, Sept. 19, 1875, 2.

158 “Indignation Meeting.”

159 “Indignation Meeting.”

160 “Mass Meeting,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Sept. 30, 1875, 1.

161 Kennard, J. H., Civil War Service Record, Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Louisiana (Washington, DC: National Archives Mircofilm Publications, n.d.), M320Google Scholar.

162 “Indignation Meeting.”

163 “Mass Meeting.”

164 Edmunds was still at the school in Dec. 1876. Minutes, Jan. 9, 1875 to Feb. 7, 1877, Orleans Parish School Board, 200.

165 DeVore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 82–85.

166 “The Colored Normal Institute,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Dec. 13, 1877, 2.

167 “Editor Louisianan,” The Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Dec. 28, 1878, 2.

168 “The Colored State University,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Oct. 21, 1880, 2.

169 “Academic School No. 4,” New Orleans Daily Democrat, June 20, 1878, 8.

170 “Death of a Colored Teacher,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), July 3, 1887, 11.

171 “Our Colored Schools,” Weekly Louisianan (New Orleans), Sept. 18, 1875, 2.