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Leontine Goins Luke helped improve Black schools in New Orleans [1]

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Date: 2024-06-10  

The Ninth Ward Civic League educated and registered Black voters in the 1950s. By 1954, 25,524 Black New Orleanians had registered. With Leontine Goins Luke at the helm, the 9th Ward had the second largest number of registrants.

“Considering the repressive political climate during these years, the actions on the part of women like… Luke are significant,” wrote Shannon Frystak in “Our Minds on Freedom.”

During a 1979 interview with historian Kim Lacy Rogers, Luke described the obstacles Black residents faced when they tried to register.

Leontine Goins Luke. Credit: The Historic New Orleans Collection

“We had registration in the schools because they made it hard at the registration office,” Luke said. “They not only give you some type of test but then they want the people to recite the preamble to the Constitution. Then they wanted them to bring a letter from the head of the household to verify that they were the person they said they were.”

Born in 1909, Luke played an important role in improving the condition of Black schools and housing. According to the Historic New Orleans Collection, she persuaded families to act as plaintiffs in the 1952 desegregation case Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board.

In addition, Luke helped to organize the 1954 McDonogh Day Boycott by Black teachers and students. As a community liaison, she provided food and clothing to the families of the four girls who integrated McDonogh No. 19 and William Frantz Elementary in November 1960. She also was the secretary and vice president of the Children’s Bureau, a child advocacy organization.

In 2021, a city commission recommended that Lee Street be renamed to honor Luke, who died in 2001.

“Women like Leontine Goins Luke,” the Historic New Orleans Collection stated, “understood that voting and integration of schools and public places all went hand-in-hand as part of the same struggle for full citizenship.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/06/10/bitd-leontine-goins-luke-black-schools-in-new-orleans/

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