On September 11, 1875, the New Orleans school board voted to appoint a New Orleans-born, Paris-educated man named E. J. Edmunds as the mathematics teacher for the city's best public high school. When school started two days later, the seniors discovered that their new teacher appeared to be “a very slightly tinged, colored man”Footnote 1 and walked out in an act of protest at having a “negro” as a teacher of “white youths.”Footnote 2 Edmunds's appointment to an all-white school and its aftermath were the dramatic culmination of years of clashes over the status of New Orleans's citizens of African descent during Reconstruction and what their place was, if any, in New Orleans's public schools.
The struggles of Reconstruction were, in a general sense, a struggle over what form black citizenship would take. While black leaders and their Radical Republican allies fought to create a “homogenous citizenry of rights-bearing individuals, all identical in the eyes of a newly powerful federal government,”Footnote 3 the Southern whiteFootnote 4 planter class and its Democratic allies fought to preserve the prewar social and economic hierarchy by ensuring that newly freed people and their descendants would remain part of a separate, second-class citizenry. Both sides recognized that shaping the country's developing public education systems was central to their goal. Black leaders throughout the South pushed for universal schooling as a path to democratic citizenship, while those who saw black literacy as a threat to the existing order sought ways to limit, contain, and control the education of black children.
With slavery abolished, maintaining a caste system would be impossible without a clear, binary conception of race. As the Creole poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote about prewar free people of color, “It is difficult to enforce laws against a race when you cannot find that race.”Footnote 5 This conception of a white-black divide was always fictional and problematic, but nowhere more so than in New Orleans, with its long history of immigration, racial mixing, and racial tolerance. The range and variation of human color were peculiarly broad in New Orleans—“as varied in color as a street of Cairo.”Footnote 6 Nineteenth-century New Orleans recognized distinctions of privilege based on fraction of African ancestry, but there were few absolutes.Footnote 7 Light-skinned people of African descent moved in and out of white circles, and the ruling caste tolerated this blurring of lines because inquiring into the backgrounds of prominent families was deemed delicate and impolite.Footnote 8 In prewar New Orleans, the wall that separated “white” from “black” was porous, and the ruling class accepted this de facto “open border” policy even as it held onto its ideology of white supremacy. With the freeing of the slaves, however, there was a new urgency to shore up the border and ensure that individuals were clearly and permanently on one side or the other of the racial line.
Because of the city's unique history, the fight over black schooling and black citizenship in New Orleans took a different form than elsewhere in the South, where formerly enslaved people forged a path of independence and self-determination by starting their own schools. In New Orleans, black leaders—including Afro-Creoles, other free blacks, and newly freed people—joined together to push back against racial categories and instead embraced a universal form of citizenship. Crucial to this view of citizenship was a public school system free of racial designations. In advancing this radical vision of equality, the campaign for black education in New Orleans did not merely go further than elsewhere, it followed a different playbook.
The story of E. J. Edmunds shows the impact of the white supremacist backlash on the lives of ordinary Afro-Creoles and offers new evidence of how the mixed-race Afro-Creole community—people in the front lines of the fight over what was meant by the “black race”—took cues from the leading voices of their community. Edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in New Orleans schools first as a student and then as a teacher. As he did, he worked in coordination with other community members and with allies to undermine racial categories, years before it was official school board policy to integrate schools. Edmunds's story, in particular the circumstances of his controversial appointment as mathematics teacher at Boys’ Central High, also provides new details about how the white ruling class responded to the threat of a newly blurred social hierarchy. White supremacists initiated a powerful war of propaganda and violence to construct a new, postemancipation social order by delineating and defining the “black race.”Footnote 9
The Postwar Debate about Black Education
One theme in any scholarly treatment of black education in the postwar South is that the fight over black education was at the heart of the struggle over the status of newly emancipated people generally. As W. E. B. Du Bois detailed in Black Reconstruction, newly freed people throughout the South sought to elevate their place in society by establishing their own schools and by leading the campaign for universal, state-mandated, public-funded education.Footnote 10 The white planter class saw public schooling as a threat to the old economic and social hierarchy that they were trying to preserve.Footnote 11 Some whites saw in public education the possibility of exerting control by using the schools as a substitute “for older and cruder methods of socialization and control.”Footnote 12 Some violently opposed black education no matter who was funding it because black education was a “fundamental effrontery” to the social order.Footnote 13 Throughout most of the South in the years immediately following the Civil War, these were the battle lines in the fight over black education. The question was whether black children should be educated at all and, if so, who would control the schools and pay for them.
Individual campaigns for black education had their own goals and motivations, depending on local circumstances. James Anderson argued that a desire for self-reliance—“to control and sustain” their own schools—drove newly freed people to establish and fund black schools.Footnote 14 Similarly, Christopher Span examined the movement in Mississippi, arguing that the thrust of the drive to educate black children was to establish publicly funded black schools that would remain under black control—achieving equality by erasing racial lines altogether was never seriously considered.Footnote 15 The crusade for black education in urban areas with significant prewar free black populations had their own unique character, especially Mobile, Charleston, and New Orleans, which had significant mixed-race populations with reason to be ambivalent about emancipation and the threat to their status.Footnote 16 Hilary Green described the situation in Mobile, which had an Afro-Creole population with well-defined rights before the war and a Creole public school. After the war the Afro-Creoles formed an uneasy alliance with freed people to create publicly funded black schools.Footnote 17 Charleston was similar to New Orleans in some ways, with a prewar black elite class that became politically involved during Reconstruction and pushed for integrated schools, but the movement there was muted compared to the one in New Orleans, and even after achieving legal equality, schools remained segregated.Footnote 18
New Orleans stands out even among these urban areas in the campaign for black education. Louisiana had a robust campaign to establish schools for newly freed people like other states did, including a campaign for funding black public schools,Footnote 19 but there was also a parallel campaign by the city's Afro-Creoles and their allies to dismantle the old prewar racial aristocracy by erasing racial designations in public schools altogether. Afro-Creoles and other free blacks “moved to make common cause with the freedmen”Footnote 20 to push for race-neutral laws that would disrupt and equalize the social order. Scholars have pointed out the backgrounds of these black leaders to explain the intellectual antecedents and the vigor of the movement. The Afro-Creoles were culturally connected to France and its revolutionary, anti-aristocratic idealsFootnote 21 and worldly enough to know that the racist beliefs of the American South were not universal.Footnote 22 Once the city's black leadership had accomplished race-blind equality under the law, they went one step further, pushing assertively to breathe life into those laws by exploiting whatever levers of power they had to open the city's best schools to children of color. White conservative Redeemers fought back with an all-out assault, using propaganda and violence to create in fact what they would later codify in law—the consolidation of a single black race, relegated to an inferior caste, in separate second-class schools.Footnote 23 The appointment of E. J. Edmunds was a pivotal moment in this struggle as the last, bold move of the city's black leaders in leveraging their political power to integrate schools and also a turning point for white supremacists in convincing the public of the righteousness and urgency of their cause.
Afro-Creoles and the Concept of Race in Prewar New Orleans
Edgar Joseph Edmunds was born in New Orleans on January 26, 1851, to the city's community of Afro-Creoles.Footnote 24 Afro-Creoles were of mixed African, French, Spanish, and Native American ancestry and tended to live among other French speakers in the neighborhoods downriver from Canal Street.Footnote 25 Because of New Orleans's unique colonial history, and because it was an international port, the culture was one of relative racial openness and racial mixing, a culture that did not exist in the rest of the South, or even in the rest of Louisiana.Footnote 26 While Afro-Creoles did not have the same social or legal status as whites, they were literate and economically self-sufficient. In spite of legal and social obstacles, free blacks “kept on amassing wealth and educating their children.”Footnote 27
By the time of the Civil War, down-river New Orleans was also full of immigrants. The 1860 census recorded that nine-year-old E. J. Edmunds was then living with his parents, Edgar and Rose, in a racially, culturally, and socially diverse slice of the French Quarter and Faubourg Trémé.Footnote 28 Of the nearly three hundred individuals recorded in the Edmunds's neighborhood, approximately 25 percent were immigrants, mostly French, Irish, and German.Footnote 29 The neighborhood was home to a merchant from Maryland whose property was worth $45,000 as well as an “oyster saloon” worker with $500 in personal property and a carpenter with only $60.Footnote 30 One black neighbor, Malvina Martin, was a hundred years old, lived in a $2,100 house that she owned, and rented rooms to two boarders.Footnote 31 About 15 percent of the Edmunds's neighbors were marked as M for “mulatto” or B for “black.” The default was to leave the “Color” column blank when taking the census. The census taker left the Edmunds's race blank, meaning that, at least in that moment and for that purpose, they were deemed “white.” This is consistent with scholars who have pointed out the inconsistencies in counting free people of color because individuals could “slip[] across the racial divide.”Footnote 32 In the case of the Edmunds, they also slipped back; later, the family would be marked M on federal census records.Footnote 33
Edmunds's father, Edgar Ambroise Edmunds, was a hardworking free man of color who worked his way up to the position of director of a dry goods importing company,Footnote 34 traveled to France multiple times on business,Footnote 35 and raised a large family in a four-bedroom house.Footnote 36 E. J.’s mother, Rose Euphémie Foy, was a biracial woman whose parents never married but who entered into a long-term liaison—a plaçage relationship—in which her white father supported her mother but they lived separately.Footnote 37 The community tolerated, and even legitimized, these relationships in some respects in early nineteenth-century New Orleans.Footnote 38 Rose's father, Prosper Foy,Footnote 39 was a French immigrant from OrléansFootnote 40 who owned plantations run by enslaved laborers, including one plantation in St. James Parish just upriver of New Orleans, on the banks of the Mississippi River.Footnote 41 Rose Foy's mother, Zélie Aubry (a “mulatto” in the 1870 censusFootnote 42), remained in New Orleans with the children in her house near Bayou RoadFootnote 43 while Prosper lived a largely separate life at this plantation. Prosper Foy received letters from his family in New Orleans from time to time delivering news—folded and sealed in red wax and addressed simply to “Monsieur Prosper Foy, Sur Son Habitation a la P. S. Jacques” (Mister Prosper Foy at his home in St. James Parish).Footnote 44 Papers and letters among Prosper Foy's archives show that he had a vast libraryFootnote 45 and that Rose spent at least some time in St. James Parish with her father.Footnote 46
Before the Civil War, the Edmunds were, in some ways, integrated into society as full citizens: they conducted business, purchased property, accumulated wealth, and lived in an integrated neighborhood. But their local legal documents, including court filings and birth certificates,Footnote 47 bore designations such as “f.p.o.c.” (free person of color), placing the Edmunds unmistakably in a lower caste. Louisiana had always had laws on the books regulating free people of color, but it is hard to know just how much the legal status of the Edmunds family interfered with their day-to-day lives. Given their neighborhoods’ cultural and social integration, it is likely that the lines of social status at that time were blurred and that the Afro-Creoles enjoyed a level of freedom that depended both on their wealth and on their fraction of African ancestry.Footnote 48 As the Civil War approached, those in power became more hostile toward free people of color and demanded that the previously “hazy lines”Footnote 49 of race be clarified.
The Education of Afro-Creoles in Prewar New Orleans
In spite of their second-class status, Afro-Creoles tended to be literate, and the prominent members of their community were sophisticated, worldly, and intellectual. E. J. Edmunds's black family members had been well educated for generations. Edgar's position as director of an importing company would have required education beyond basic literacy and arithmetic. Rose and her brother, Florville Foy, both wrote beautifully in French,Footnote 50 and evidence (a receipt for “1 mois de classe de florville” [one month of class for Florville]) shows that Florville received his education in a private school or through a tutor.Footnote 51 Florville later became a highly successful artist and businessmanFootnote 52 who had sufficient education to manage his many properties.Footnote 53 E. J.’s grandmother Zélie also must have been educated, as she brought a court case in 1828 seeking a court's permission to sell an enslaved woman that Prosper had “donated” to her minor children.Footnote 54 While it is jarring to learn that Edmunds's black family members kept a woman enslaved, the court case does demonstrate that Zélie was sophisticated enough to use the legal system to manage her financial affairs. The Edmunds and Foy families were typical among the Afro-Creole community in that they had a high level of education, which they received outside of the system that educated white children in New Orleans.
E. J., like many of the children in his neighborhood that the 1860 census recorded, was not in school.Footnote 55 By 1860, New Orleans's public school system, although successful, was still developing, and at this point it was open only to white children.Footnote 56 The city had not yet established separate public schools for black children, something that would not happen until after the war when conservative city officials finally incorporated leftover Freedmen's Bureau schoolsFootnote 57 into the public system as a defensive measure to prevent integration.Footnote 58 Under the federal occupation, the military and then the Freedmen's Bureau would establish schools for newly emancipated people in New Orleans, but any schools for the city's Afro-Creoles, who were French-speaking and higher in social status, would have been separate from these schools and would have predated them.Footnote 59
Before the Civil War, many prominent Afro-Creoles likely educated their children with private tutors or in small-scale community schools operated in homes. Given Edmunds's level of mathematical sophistication at the time he tested into college, he must have received his education this way. In her research, Sarah Hyde found a strong culture of home schooling and small, family-run schools for white families in the Gulf South,Footnote 60 and so it should not be surprising that the Afro-Creole community set up schools of its own following this tradition. The Catholic Church also had a long history of educating both free and enslaved blacks in New Orleans.Footnote 61 While Catholic schools had been an essential part of the free black community for generations and may have laid the cultural groundwork for the private community schools,Footnote 62 they would not have taught at the same academic level as the best private schools.Footnote 63 An 1866 Harper's Magazine article provides a contemporaneous account of the private community schools and explains how they avoided attracting any attention that might have caused a backlash by operating “in private houses, without any external appearance which would indicate that the building was used for educational purposes.”Footnote 64 The author remarked, “The city government does no more condescend to notice them than it does the colored boot-blacks around Saint Charles Hotel.”Footnote 65 The city's neglect benefited the black community because in New Orleans “private schools for colored people … long existed and prospered.”Footnote 66 Scholars have noted that the Afro-Creole community's most prominent citizens—poets, musicians, and newspaper editors—were teachers in these “colored schools.”Footnote 67 The teachers named were almost uniformly male, perhaps reflecting the importance the community put on education. Ironically, it may have been his exclusion from the city's white schools that gave E. J. his best opportunity to test into the École Polytechnique and study mathematics at such a high level.
Emancipation and the New Urgency to Act
With emancipation, the status of the Edmunds family and other Afro-Creoles became more uncertain. They had always been “above” enslaved blacks by virtue of their freedom, but what now? New Orleans's black political elite, including the Afro-Creoles, would respond to this issue by embracing the ideal of a homogenous, equal citizenry and seeking to erase racial designations all together in New Orleans public schools.
The campaign for black civil rights in New Orleans is too complex to be treated fully here, but a pivotal moment in that fight came in the spring of 1868. This must have been a time of great energy and optimism. Republicans had won a landslide victory in the 1866 congressional elections, giving them the moral and political authority to reassert federal control over Southern governments, which they did with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868. Under this period of “Radical Reconstruction,” Philip Sheridan, the governor of the military district that included Louisiana, removed ex-Confederates from office and set up conditions for many African American men to move into positions of power.Footnote 68 In this period, the city produced and attracted black leaders from all backgroundsFootnote 69 who worked together for the same cause. They were “vigorous, impatient, and self-assured,” like the young men of the American Revolution.Footnote 70 Ordinary black citizens in New Orleans were also emboldened in these years to challenge discriminatory laws and practices, such as by riding “white” streetcars, daring the police to arrest them,Footnote 71 and their actions led to the integration of streetcarsFootnote 72 and some juries.Footnote 73 The New Orleans Tribune, the “voice of Louisiana Radicalism and black rights,”Footnote 74 published an editorial in November 1867 that marveled at the “great social and political transformations” that had taken place already, dismissed the possibility of a counterreaction by white supremacists (“fossils who should rather be pitied than condemned”), and predicted that “the new state of things … [could] never be undone.”Footnote 75 Feeling the wind at their backs, Louisiana's black leaders worked with their Republican allies to draft a new state constitution, which was finalized on March 7, 1868. While the Reconstruction Acts required Southern states to adopt new constitutions that would guarantee universal male suffrage,Footnote 76 the Louisiana Constitution of 1868, later ratified by popular vote, went far beyond that and was almost uniqueFootnote 77 in its sweeping view of human equality.
Louisiana's Constitution of 1868 adapted language from the Declaration of Independence, stating that “all men are created free and equal,” and this time “all men” would include black men. The new constitution also codified and clarified the ideas behind the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and of the Fourteenth Amendment in guaranteeing the “same civil, political, and public rights and privileges” to all, without regard to race.Footnote 78 The philosophical underpinning of the new constitution was exactly what Afro-Creole leaders had advocated. The Tribune rejected the idea that their movement was about securing rights for one group or another—advocating instead for “equal laws and impartiality.”Footnote 79 The new constitution also contained one specific guarantee of equality that perhaps more than any other threatened the city's ruling caste. Article 135 required the state to provide a free public education to all children and outlawed racially segregated schools.Footnote 80 School integration was a divisive subject, even among Republicans. School officials would not implement Article 135 until January 1871 and only after a power struggle in which a Radical Republican state legislature wrested control of the schools from the New Orleans City Council in favor of their own appointees.Footnote 81
Members of the city's black community, emboldened by the events of 1868, began to enter historically white public schools around that time, years before the school board implemented the integration policy. E. J. and his younger siblings, Arnold and Olivia, were among these pioneers. Fourteen-year-old Arnold attended the Fillmore School, an all-boys grammar school, in 1867 and 1868, when he graduated as the top student.Footnote 82 Afterward, Arnold entered and then graduated from Boys’ Central High School, which was considered the best school in the city and where his E. J. would later teach.Footnote 83 E. J.’s younger sister, Olivia, attended the Bayou Road Girls’ School, another “white” public school, in the spring of 1868. Olivia was not alone. She was one of twenty-eight students who were outed as “black” by classmates in May 1868, causing the city school superintendent to initiate an investigation. The school's principal, Stephanie Bigot, claimed ignorance of the children's races, and the school board eventually cleared her.Footnote 84
Scholars have used the Bayou Road incident to illustrate initial isolated efforts to begin integration and the school board's aggressive reaction to maintain segregation,Footnote 85 but details about Olivia's time at the school complicate the picture. New evidence suggests that Olivia Edmunds was part of a more extensive effort in the French-speaking areas at this time in which students of African descent entered schools, aided by officials who were willing to look the other way. Bigot had reason to know that she was admitting students of color. Some of the twenty-eight had “very light complexions,” but others were darker.Footnote 86 Bigot was not naïve; she had been working in the public school system almost since its beginning and was an esteemed principal of a well-run school.Footnote 87 If the students who outed Olivia had reason to know that such a large fraction of the Bayou Road School was of African descent (about 14 percent of the school), then the principal had reason to know too. Local officials from the French-speaking areas also knew. The officials who initially investigated the claims of black enrollment reported back to the city school board that there was no problem, causing the school board to accuse the delegation of “wink[ing] at the fact that colored students had been received in schools in that section of the city.”Footnote 88
In response to the school board's investigation, the twenty-eight Bayou Road students “charged with being black” were required to produce proof of their all-white lineage to remain at the school. Most eventually did,Footnote 89 including Olivia, whose “proof” was a new birth certificate, refiled with the state in the middle of the investigation, this time with the racial designations missing.Footnote 90 Of course, the refiling of the birth certificate would be possible only with the knowledge and help of a clerk. The clerk who signed Olivia's new birth certificate was himself, according to real estate records, designated as a free person of color before the war and seems to have slipped over the color line.Footnote 91 The new birth certificate must have been questionable on its face as evidence of her “whiteness” because the new, more recent filing date is written on the certificate. The board accepted Olivia's birth certificate, and those of at least several other students, including some with dark complexions.Footnote 92 It seems likely that the board was more interested in drawing a clear line than in ensuring that any particular child was on the “right” side of the line. Perhaps this is also evidence that the line between black and white—when it came to the place of Afro-Creoles—was still blurred at this time.
Two years later, in the 1869–1870 school year, Olivia was still a student at the Bayou Road Girls’ School,Footnote 93 and Bigot was still the principal.Footnote 94 The Daily Picayune (later the Times-Picayune) made note of seeing black children at the school again that year: “We must confess that we were greatly astonished in finding these colored children occupying seats alongside of white children. We are, however, informed that they have been attending this school for some time, without meeting opposition from any quarters.”Footnote 95 It is apparent from the quote that multiple children who were visibly of African descent were at the school and that Bigot was attempting to protect her students from nosey reporters. The fact that she was still enrolling black students two years after being made to answer to the city school board for this charge confirms both that it was done purposefully and that she had support in her district for the practice. The evidence of persistent racial integration at the Bayou Road School, all while the school administration and local district officials maintained the façade that it was a “white” school, demonstrates that New Orleans citizens had not yet coalesced around firm racial categories in the first few years after the War. The school board's actions in investigating the Bayou Road School also show the ruling caste's early, ineffective attempt to enforce new racial boundaries.
E. J., like his brother, attended the Fillmore School in these years.Footnote 96 E. J. ‘s parents also filed a birth certificate for him in May 1868 without the racial designations,Footnote 97 likely for the same reason they refiled Olivia's birth certificate. The Fillmore School was a good school, but it was only a grammar school, and E. J. was already at least seventeen years old when he entered. E. J. must have been highly educated in private schools because after graduating he passed a rigorous set of oral and written exams in mathematics and scienceFootnote 98 to enter the École Polytechnique in Paris.Footnote 99 It is unclear why E. J. bothered to attend the Fillmore School at all, except perhaps that it would have allowed him to take the high school entrance exam in the fall if he had stayed in New Orleans.
A newspaper article published after formal integration began in January 1871 gives further evidence that the Edmunds siblings were part of a larger movement in which New Olreans black community began to enter “white” schools even before they gained the support of the school board. Teachers in 1871 confirmed that integration was not new and that by that time the “mixing of the public schools has silently and gradually been going on.”Footnote 100 Scholars who have addressed Louisiana's brief period of school integration have concluded that, other than isolated incidents, meaningful integration did not happen until the school board policy changed and schools were integrated formally.Footnote 101 The new evidence about the Edmunds siblings and the circumstances of their public schooling suggest that the Afro-Creole community and its allies initiated a quiet movement to undermine racial categories and racial segregation in schools years before it was the official policy of the school board—and that in response, white supremacists began to organize against them.
Formal School Integration Begins
The 1870–1871 school year was significant in the campaign for school integration. An array of political tactics and court battles had prevented integration, but in December 1870 a court decision paved the way for action by handing control of the schools to allies of the integration movement.Footnote 102 The school board could have used its position of power in a number of ways, but the course it chose was moderate and consistent with their race-neutral philosophy. The board stripped official racial designations from both schools and students,Footnote 103 and, in theory, students were permitted to enroll where they liked. Schools that were designated “colored” before tended to remain so, but the “white” schools were now open to everyone.
A January 12, 1871, Daily Picayune article reflects the community's anticipation as the board took the first steps toward integration:
There [were] … some rumors that the question of admitting negro children into our public schools had been forced to an issue. … [T]he rumors proved to be true in so far as colored pupils had been admitted into two white schools as far as we could ascertain.Footnote 104
The Daily Picayune, a prosegregation paper that would later launch vile attacks concerning Edmunds's appointment, was more balanced in its reporting on integration at this time. The paper remarked that some schools lost students but admits that integration was successful at the Robertson Girls’ School; while “the colored mixture ha[d] been forced in[to]” the school, there was no “ill effect,” and the school was “flourishing.”Footnote 105 Historian Louis Harlan estimated that approximately one-third of the city's schools were integrated in the years 1871 to 1874 and that the movement was successful in large part because of the black men in political leadership positions who defended and sustained it, even when others could not muster the political will.Footnote 106 What Harlan did not mention is that the experiment's success also depended on the children and their families of African descent who chose to enroll and attend integrated schools, in spite of the difficulties.
Edmunds graduated from the Fillmore School in June 1871, five months after integration formally began. He traveled to Paris later that month, to enter the École Polytechnique, which was the top college of mathematics and science in France, perhaps even the world, at the time.Footnote 107 A photograph of Edmunds from the École Polytechnique archives shows him and some of his classmates in their military uniforms posing on the school steps.Footnote 108 Edmunds stayed at the École Polytechnique for the standard two-year course of study and afterward entered, but did not finish, his training at the l'Ecole d'Application de l'Artillerie et du Génie (the School of Application of Artillery and Engineering) in Fontainebleau, France.Footnote 109 Edmunds returned to New Orleans sometime between 1873 and 1875, and in April 1875 Edmunds was appointed principal of Sumner Boys’ School, an all-black public grammar school,Footnote 110 for the remaining months of the school year.Footnote 111 The next fall, Edmunds would receive his controversial assignment.
E. J. Edmunds at the École Polytechnique, bottom left, seated. (Salle 8 [group photograph], Collections École Polytechnique, Bibliothèque Central, Centre de Ressources Historiques (Palaiseau, France), file X2B 54 / 1871–1872, used with permission.).
White Supremacists Reassert Dominance
The years leading up to Edmunds's appointment were the beginning of the so-called Southern “Redemption.” The period saw a renewed boldness of white-supremacist Democrats in Louisiana and a new willingness to use violence to achieve what they could not accomplish politically. In Colfax, Louisiana, in April 1873, armed white Democrats overpowered a group of freedmen who had seized the county courthouse after a disputed election, resulting in “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage”Footnote 112 in Reconstruction. The following year, on September 14, 1874, an armed gang of eight thousand men overthrew the Republican governor, William Kellogg,Footnote 113 until federal troops restored him to power. On a national level, Democrats made gains in the 1874 election, and to ensure the passage of what would be the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Republicans removed the school integration clause from the bill, an indication that support for Reconstruction on a national level was waning.Footnote 114
With momentum finally on their side, the conservative press, led by the New Orleans Bulletin, the voice of the White League,Footnote 115 found a strategy that helped them launch an all-out war on the city's integrated schools. On December 14, 1874, three girls from the Coliseum Street Colored Girls School arrived to take the entrance exam at the Girls’ Upper High School. (There was no separate “colored” high school at this time.) The principal turned the girls away, but the school's current students were not satisfied and threatened to boycott the school.Footnote 116 The event may have gone unnoticed, but the conservative press leveraged it to start a movement. The Bulletin ran a front-page story calling the protest the “first gun in the war” and “their 14th of September”Footnote 117—a reference to the coup from earlier that fall. The Bulletin organized and encouraged further protests by meeting with students in its offices and by printing calls for others to follow the lead.Footnote 118 The New Orleans Times ran a story the same day praising the protesters and declaring that it was an “Exciting Time” for opponents of mixed schools.Footnote 119 The Daily Picayune followed the lead of the other papers in praising the “brave New Orleans girls who have so earnestly … asserted their rights” and wished them success.Footnote 120 The city's papers, most of which were Democrat-leaning and politically conservative, ran daily stories on the movement they were simultaneously building, praising copycat acts of student protest, such as when a group of boys (so-called “Youthful Knights”) patrolled the perimeter of Boys’ Central High to prevent black boys from taking the school's entrance exam.Footnote 121
The calls for action from the press were paired with a relentless propaganda war to reestablish the dominance of the white ruling caste by defining and diminishing people of African ancestry based on a strict binary conception of race. While the city's black leadership was disciplined in their race-neutral message of equality, the conservative press manufactured a race problem and then placed it front and center: “At last the race-issue has been definitely raised.”Footnote 122 The argument was not at all subtle. The Bulletin, for example, argued that racial separation was necessary because the black race was the “inferior race,” and it made appeals to history, philosophy, the laws of “physiology and psychology,” and the “science of archeology” to back up its claim.Footnote 123
With overtly racialized assertions like these, it is easy to overlook the subtlety of how the press delineated and shaped the concept of the negro. In prewar New Orleans, several race-conscious terms, including negro and colored, were used to navigate distinctions of ethnic and cultural background, skin color, and social status,Footnote 124 but the conservative press now conflated the terms. They swept aside the distinctions because the only thing that mattered now was whether a person was at all “tainted” by African descent. The Bulletin, for example, asserted that there were two races, “physiologically apart,” and that “an admixture of an inferior with a superior race” also produces an inferior group.Footnote 125 The Daily Picayune spoke of a negro essence in the mixed-race members of the school board—the “negro character” and the “nature” of colored peopleFootnote 126—as though they shared a common, identifiable, debasing characteristic. Having argued that the essence of the negro was base, it became a moral imperative to protect white children; the paper referenced the need to maintain the “integrity” of white schoolsFootnote 127 and the “purification” of schools by removing students of color.Footnote 128
The propaganda was effective. Even the New Orleans Republican, a white-run paper that was sanctioned by the Union-occupied government and was generally a supporter of political equality, adopted the idea that the controversy was, in essence, a war between two races: The paper characterized the girls’ protest as “resist[ing] the forcible introduction in their midst of colored girls.”Footnote 129 The framing of the issue in that way, as if the white girls were protecting themselves from a forceful invasion, signaled the Republican’s shift away from supporting integrated schools.Footnote 130 Black leaders were undaunted and stuck to their position. The Weekly Louisianan, a Reconstruction-era newspaper founded and edited by the city's African American political elite,Footnote 131 berated the Republican for compromising its principles and abandoning its allies, arguing that “drawing of lines between the races [was] dubious” and that both morally and legally, “the distinction now sought ha[d] been abolished.”Footnote 132
From there, the movement spread and triggered violence. In a letter to the school board, members of the junior class from Boys’ Central High adopted the talking points of the conservative, white press. They spoke of the “miserable stench” of the “negro” and the need to preserve the “sacredness” of all-white classrooms.Footnote 133 A group of students from the school then took matters into their own hands by entering a nearby integrated school and forcibly removing students suspected of African descent from their classrooms. It must have been a bizarre and tragic scene—a group of high school boys checking each classroom of a girls school, classifying them based on the color of their skin, with the girls they “found spiced a little too highly” in tears as they collected their things to leave.Footnote 134 The movement spread to other schools over the next days.Footnote 135 The boys discovered that identifying people of African descent was not as straightforward as they had been led to believe, making mistakes of both overinclusion and underinclusion. They ejected some dark-skinned Jewish students and left alone some students whose African ancestry was not apparent; they returned later to correct the mistakes.Footnote 136 One of the girls outed some of the aggressor boys as being “colored” themselves, which led to further investigations and scandals about racial purity.Footnote 137 As bumbling as this effort was, the movement ignited by the Bulletin’s rhetoric spread, leading to mobs, street violence, and even one black man's death.Footnote 138
With the racial unrest, white Republican voices grew timid about integration, but the school board did not. In September 1875, African American political leadersFootnote 139 dominated the seventeen-member school board, and these men wanted to push the idea of race-neutral schools as far as they could. The most vocal member of the 1875 board, and its de facto leader, was P. B. S. Pinchback, the son of a slave from Georgia. Pinchback was no ordinary school board member. Before his school board appointment, Pinchback helped draft the 1868 constitution, had served briefly as governor, was elected US Senator, and founded the Weekly Louisianan.Footnote 140 His decision to put his political weight behind Edmunds's appointment, and to school integration generally, speaks to the importance of the issue to New Orleans's black leaders.
Edmunds Appointment Fuels Anti-Immigration Propaganda War
On September 11, 1875, the Pinchback school board doubled down on its policy of race neutrality by appointing E. J. EdmundsFootnote 141 as one of six teachers at the Boys’ Central High School in New Orleans,Footnote 142 the very same school whose boys had recently caused violence in the name of racial purity. It is not clear where the idea of Edmunds candidacy originated; the minutes do not record the discussions or the vote tally, and in fact the board was later accused of making the decisions secretly so that no one member could be blamed.Footnote 143 Wherever the idea originated, the school board knew Edmunds well. The same board members had appointed him a few months earlier as principal of the all-black Sumner School. Even before Edmunds returned to New Orleans from France, the black board members likely knew of Edmunds. Within this tight community, prominent members knew each other, and Edmunds's studies at the École Polytechnique would have been a source of community pride. Edmunds also called attention to himself as principal of the Sumner School by making a formal complaint to the school board of “disturbances” from boys from the nearby all-white Fisk School.Footnote 144 Pinchback later defended Edmunds's extraordinary qualifications but also hinted that Edmunds's appointment was meant as a test case to clarify the status of black people.Footnote 145 Edmunds was a perfect subject for such a test not only because of his academic degree but because of his prominent family background and fair skin color. In spite of his qualifications, the appointment was an act of defiance for both the board and E. J. Edmunds himself, who would have been aware of the context. In this charged atmosphere, Edmunds and the board must have known that the conservative, white press would see his appointment as a shot across the bow.
The Republican describes the protest on Edmunds's first day as a small incident and the only one in the city that otherwise saw a successful first day of school. When boys from the senior class protested to their principal about having a “colored” man as a teacher, the principal told them that they had two choices, to stay or to leave. The eleven boys of the senior class opted to walk out, some under pressure from their classmates.Footnote 146 The white-supremacist press responded by doing what they had successfully done before—promoting and escalating dissent through a barrage of stories and editorials praising acts of protest as an act of “moral purity”Footnote 147 and a “sacred duty.”Footnote 148 A week after Edmunds's appointment, the Bulletin, under the headline “Colored Teachers in White Schools,” published a list of black teachers’ names, and even a black child, who were currently working in or attending “white” schools.Footnote 149 The paper gave no context or explanation for the list, but none was needed. It was clear that the Bulletin was encouraging its readers to remove black people from the schools as they had in December.
Again, coupled with the imperative to act, this was a propaganda war to justify the movement's moral high ground, and the language grew even more extreme. The white-supremacist press painted a picture of an us-versus-them war between two poles—white versus black, good versus evil, purity versus filth, even human versus animal. The Bulletin compared a school with black children to a shop being “fumigated for disinfection”Footnote 150 and claimed that white parents were withdrawing their children “in order to save them from contamination.”Footnote 151 It warned white teachers who taught black children that they were breathing in the “the odor of immorality.”Footnote 152 The New Orleans Times spoke of blacks “forc[ing] themselves upon the white children.”Footnote 153 The Daily Picayune said that mixing races in schools was “unnatural and disgusting.”Footnote 154 The black members of the school board, especially Pinchback, were the subject of particularly vile attacks that questioned their morality, intelligence, and competence. The Catholic newspaper, which was staunchly white-supremacist even though Catholic schools in the city had a long history of racial tolerance and outreach, referred to the black school board members as “ignorant negroes” and attributed to them “immoralities too gross for enumeration here.”Footnote 155 The paper said that it was humiliating for white women dealing with the black men on the board to have to use a “tone of deference and veneration.”Footnote 156 As for Edmunds himself, his prestigious academic degree did not fit into the world view of the white supremacists: the newspapers concluded that he must either have lied about his degree or received it through “a species of fraud.”Footnote 157
The campaign culminated with a call for a public meeting in Lafayette Square on September 29, 1875. The Bulletin had published daily reminders about the meeting and postponed it more than once for weather; it was hurricane season after all. The night of the meeting, a crowd of “men and boys,”Footnote 158 assembled, and more people arrived as the meeting progressed. Small boys remained on the outskirts of the group, playing, making noise, and drowning out the speakers.Footnote 159 It is not clear how many of the people there were supporters and how many were there simply out of curiosity. The chair of the organizing committee, Edward Phillips, was a lawyer who had been actively involved in anti-Reconstruction protests before. He opened the meeting with a plea to the public about the importance of the issue of race in the schools (“It is a question which underlies the very foundation of our society”).Footnote 160 The main speaker that evening was Judge J. H. Kennard, an ex-Confederate soldierFootnote 161 and judge who dismissed the law (“I care not for the Constitution of the United States. I care not for the one hundred and thirty-fifth article of that of Louisiana”) on the grounds that “the legislation of God” against mixing races was higher and justified an armed revolution.Footnote 162 The meeting ended with the adoption of a resolution stating, among other things, that by appointing Edmunds and “forc[ing] the race issue in the public schools,” Pinchback and the other black members of the board violated the public trust.Footnote 163 The organizers called for the board's resignation.
Edmunds won the battle but not the war. The board finished its term, and Edmunds stayed at Central Boys’ High SchoolFootnote 164 until the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops, the return of Democrats to power, and the cementing of racial categories in New Orleans public schools.Footnote 165 Edmunds continued to teach at various “colored” schools that were opening in and out of the city, including a position as one of two founding faculty members of The Colored Normal Institute,Footnote 166 a position as the principal of the Colored High School,Footnote 167 and a position as the first chair of the Mathematics Department of the new Southern University.Footnote 168 Tragically, Edmunds began suffering from an illness, perhaps as early as 1878,Footnote 169 and he died in a mental asylum in 1887 at the age of 36.Footnote 170
Conclusion
It is by tracing the history of people like Edmunds, who lived in the blurred area between “black” and “white,” between slavery and freedom, that we see so clearly what was at stake for this population during Reconstruction. Afro-Creoles before the war lived precarious lives, with their rights subject to the whims of the ruling caste, who could withdraw their privileged status at any moment. In some ways their lives were full, but in other respects they lived in the shadows, hoping to avoid any notice that might cause a backlash. In spite of their status, the Afro-Creoles clearly felt no sense of inferiority. They developed community networks before the war to educate their own children and, in the case of E. J. Edmunds, to such a level that he could compete with the best young mathematical minds of Europe. After the Civil War, Afro-Creoles dared to believe they could use public schools to tear down what was left of the old racial order, even when their white Republican allies were too cautious to take a stand. Even ordinary Afro-Creoles, like E. J. and his siblings, had the confidence in their abilities and their preparation to enter the schools that had excluded them for decades. They entered as soon as the schools were open to them, and in some cases even before. With Reconstruction came hope and promise, and the New Orleans Afro-Creole community did not hesitate to claim their place in society.
Afro-Creole leaders, and other black leaders like Pinchback who were drawn to New Orleans, were guided by a clear-eyed, intellectual vision rooted in the ideals of the French Revolution; they were dismantling an aristocracy. These men were ahead of their time in one sense, recognizing “race” as a dubious concept that the ruling caste used as a tool to oppress. They chose their words and their actions carefully, treating the concept of race almost dismissively, with the lack of seriousness they believed it deserved. The black Weekly Louisianan captured that dismissive attitude in talking about white supremacists: “Foolish caste lovers will insist on the distinction.”Footnote 171 This confidence in the rightness of their vision may seem naïve today given the horror of what was to come. The white supremacist campaign to consolidate the population of African descent into a unified, lower caste—the “negro race”—was savage and potent. A narrative that paints a story about a conflict of good over evil captures the imagination more than an intellectual argument about human equality, and in the end New Orleans's historical uniqueness did not save it from the decades of Jim Crow that afflicted the rest of the South.
