Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

Richard Strauss. 1 The N. O. Opera’s performance of The Abduction actually preceded the first Met’s performance.
Herbert also believed in cooperation among opera lovers. He instituted a cooperative agreement
with a fledgling company in Shreveport to share singers, chorus, and sets.
In 1954, the Opera Board dismissed Herbert, an apparent act of shortsightedness that was to benefit
Houston. There he created what has become the great Houston Grand Opera. While in Houston
he also helped Sister of the Blessed Sacrament M. Elise Sisson found Opera/South in Jackson,
Mississippi, a primarily African/American company. He remained in Houston until 1972 when he
departed for and founded the San Diego Opera. He married the Chorus Director Madeleine Beckhard.
Truly, Walter Herbert was a Johnny Appleseed of opera.
1 My thanks to Jack Belsom for sharing notes from his upcoming book on the New Orleans Opera.
A.P. TUREAUD
(1899-1972)
The only African-American practicing attorney in Louisiana for a number of years, Alexander
Pierre Tureaud led the legal challenges that overturned segregation in New Orleans. During his long
career, he represented the NAACP in voting matters; overcame efforts by the state legislature to preserve
school segregation, and generally litigated the cases that brought down local segregation.
A New Orleans Creole, Tureaud fled the city in his youth. He moved to Chicago as a teenager,
working as a laborer in a railyard. In New York he worked briefly as a dishwasher. Moving to
Washington, D.C. he fell into his calling as junior clerk in the library of the United States
Department of Justice. There he was able to enroll in the law school of Howard University,
graduating in 1925. Tureaud returned to New Orleans the following year when the dean of
black politicians, Walter Cohen (q.v.), hired him to work for the Comptroller of Customs at
the Port of New Orleans. Five years later he married Lucille Dejoie (q.v.), equally well connected
in the Creole community.
In 1940, the NAACP in New Orleans summoned the legendary litigator Thurgood
Marshall to represent it in the case Joseph P. McKelpin v. Orleans Parish School Board. African
American teachers from the segregated public school system had filed the suit against the
school board for salaries equal to their white counterparts. At that time Marshall retained
Tureaud as local counsel on the case. On September 1, 1942, the case was settled out of court.
Tureaud resigned his post at the Customs Office and entered private practice. For the next
thirty years, he represented plaintiffs on dozens of significant cases that gradually chipped
away at the institution of segregation in New Orleans and Louisiana. The Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge was one of his principal targets. In three cases, notably Payne v.
LSU, he forced LSU to admit African-Americans.
From the earliest days the Civil Rights movement had been concerned about the right to
vote. In 1952, Tureaud argued a suit to eliminate local hindrances to voting, a suit brought
by the NAACP known as Edward Hall v. T.J. Nagel, Registrar of Voters. It was a great victory.
The famous case of Brown v. Board of Education in Arkansas led to successor suits. Federal District
Judge J. Skelly Wright, (q.v.) quashed the Legislature’s attempt to preserve segregation by state law
in Earl Benjamin Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, a suit argued by Tureaud.
Over the decade Tureaud’s many petitions following this decision led directly to the desegregation
of New Orleans Public Schools. Towards the end of the 1950s he became involved in the issue
of segregation in places of public accommodation. The arrest of three students in Baton Rouge
sparked the sit-in movement beginning in 1959. Tureaud and the NAACP developed the case of
Garner v. Louisiana that the U. S. Supreme Court decided in 1961 in favor of the students. The
A.P. Tureaud.
PHOTO OF SHELEEN P. JONES PORTRAIT STATUE, TAKEN BY
CAROLYN KOLB.
BIOGRAPHIES
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