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Colored Waif’s Home founded to keep Black boys out Parish Prison [1]

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Date: 2024-06-12  

Black boys arrested prior to 1906 were sent to Parish Prison and housed with adults. The opening of the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys that year provided another option.

According to a 2016 JAZZIZ article, the Colored Branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children opened the reform school in an abandoned building that had been designed for French orphans in the 1830s. The building, located on the corner of Conti Street and City Park Avenue, was surrounded by barbed wire, graveyards and farms.

The home was the brainchild of 27-year-old Capt. Joseph Jones, who pitched his idea to Black lawyers, farmers and community leaders. Judge Andrew Wilson championed the concept, helping to make it a reality.

Described in a 1909 report edited by W.E.B. Dubois as “two very estimable Christian persons … doing their best to reform the boys in their charge,” Jones and his wife Manuella ran the home like a strict military institution.

“The Waif’s Home was far from luxurious. The boys slept on bare bunks with a single blanket to cover them on cold nights,” Matt Micucci wrote in JAZZIZ. “Anyone who tried to escape would be severely punished.”

The home was life-changing for jazz great Louis Armstrong, who was 12 when he was arrested for shooting his stepfather’s pistol on Jan. 1, 1913. Judge Wilson sent him to the Waif’s home, where he sharpened his cornetist skills and led the brass band before being released 18 months later.

According to The Advocate, the Waif’s Home merged with Milne Boys Home in 1932. A new campus at 5420 Franklin Ave. opened in 1933 and closed in 1986.

Renovated after being destroyed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 17-acre campus now houses the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission (NORDC) headquarters.

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

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/06/12/bitd-colored-waifs-home-parish-prison/

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