Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Gwendolyn Midlo was born in New Orleans in 1929, the daughter of a civil rights and labor attorney. At sixteen she helped found the interracial New Orleans Youth Council, which backed Black voter registration and challenged segregation laws, and in 1946 she joined the executive board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. She earned her doctorate in Latin American history in 1970. Her book Africans in Colonial Louisiana won nine prizes, and New Orleans jazz musicians call it the purple book. She died in Mexico in 2022, aged ninety-three.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — steps away
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• Destrehan Plantation — 18 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• Laurel Valley Village — 19 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 20 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.

More markers nearby

• The Slave Quarters — steps away
• The Big House — steps away
• Colonial Sugars Refinery — 1.8 mi
• Colonial Sugars Refinery — 2.1 mi