E. J. Edmunds, School Integration, and White Supremacist Backlash in Reconstruction New Orleans

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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”¹ and walked out in an act of protest at having a “negro” as a teacher of “white youths.”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,”³ the Southern white⁴ 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.”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.”⁶ Nineteenth-century New Orleans recognized distinctions of privilege based on fraction of African ancestry, but there were few absolutes.⁷ Light-skinned people...