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Rodolphe Desdunes: Civil rights activist involved in Battle of Liberty Place [1]

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Date: 2024-05-15  

As a customs clerk, journalist, historian, poet, police officer, teacher and civil rights activist, Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes played a significant role in New Orleans history.

Born in New Orleans in 1849, Desdunes studied law at Straight University, graduating in 1882. He taught Black orphans at the Institut Catholique, according to New Orleans Historical. He also was injured as a member of the state militia that fought against the segregationist Crescent City White League during the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place.

A year after the Separate Car Act of 1890 was adopted, Desdunes expressed his outrage in “The Crusader,” a Black newspaper.

“Among the many schemes devised by Southern statesmen to divide the races, none is so audacious and insulting as the one which provides separate cars for Black and white people on the railways running through the state,” he wrote. “It is like a slap in the face of every member of the Black race, whether he has the full measure or only one-eighth of that blood.”

In 1892, Comité des Citoyens (Citizens’ Committee), founded by Desdunes and other Creoles, implemented a plan in which Desdunes’ son Daniel was to get arrested for riding on a white railcar headed to Mobile, Ala. With his arrest, Comité could challenge the Separate Car Act in court. Judge John Ferguson ruled the act only applied to travel within Louisiana.

“Learning from that mistake, the train Homer Plessy boarded a few months later traveled within the state” setting the stage for Plessy v. Ferguson, New Orleans Historical states.

While working in the U.S. Customs House in 1908, Desdunes was supervising a ship’s cargo being weighed when he was blinded by granite dust that blew into his eyes. He retired and moved to Omaha, Neb. He died in Omaha on Aug. 14, 1928 from larynx cancer. Returned to New Orleans, his remains are in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/05/15/bitd-rodolphe-desdunes-civil-rights/

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