Ambassador Wilbert John Le Melle

Wilbert Le Melle, one of eight children, trained for the priesthood at Notre Dame Seminary and left it around age 24. After Army service from 1957 to 1959 he earned a doctorate at the University of Denver in 1963, then taught at Grambling and Boston University. At the Ford Foundation from 1965 he spent about nine years living in African countries as a program officer. He served as ambassador to Kenya and Seychelles from 1977 to 1980, then became a SUNY vice-chancellor and led Mercy College and the Phelps Stokes Fund. He died in 2003.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.6 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.2 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.4 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.4 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Howe Institute — 0.3 mi
• Queen Mother Moore - African Liberation Leader — 0.5 mi
• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — 0.5 mi
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — 0.5 mi