Lafayette, LA – Several University of Louisiana at Lafayette students are feeling the effects from the recent earthquake in Haiti. In a blog to the university community, UL Lafayette President Joseph Savoie said 14 students from Haiti have been personally affected by the earthquake.
After UL/SLI pioneered desegregation for the South in 1954, other south Louisiana universities-- McNeese, Southeastern, UNO, and later Nicholls-- followed suit. But the effort stalled on other campuses.
As classes in the newly-desegregated SLI (UL) began, the administration chose a path that minimized conflict, but one that also obscured UL's critical place in desegregation: the University kept a low profile, and media coverage-- and hence, public awareness and documentation-- was successfully discouraged.
The continuing story of UL's pivotal role in desegregation of education in the US. In this part, the university and local community reacts to the approaching first semester of desegregation.
In 1953, four African-American plaintiffs sued then-SLI for admittance, and in so doing made Acadiana & UL the pioneers for desegregation of higher education in the South.
In 1954, UL (then Southwestern Louisiana Institute) paved the way for college desegregation in the South and across the nation, led by four African-American students and their families who sued for equal access to higher education.
1954, UL (then-Southwestern Louisiana Institute) became the pioneer institution in the South in desegregating. Part II of this serializaton looks at the lawsuits that led up to the integration of UL, of Louisiana, and eventually of the South.
In 1954, UL became the first school in the country to comply with the Supreme Court's desegregation order of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. It also became the first historically white school in the South to desegregate in any permanent and meaningful way. UL alumnus and Appalachian State University historian Mike Wade chronicled UL's story in Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement, published by the University Press of Florida.
