Black Academy At Mt. Olive Baptist Church

Teaching Black children in St. Landry had already cost people dearly before 1897. White vigilantes closed the Grimble Bell School, which taught free children of color. In September 1868 a mob ransacked the Freedmen's Bureau school in Opelousas and destroyed the press of the Republican St. Landry Progress. Its teacher, eighteen-year-old Emerson Bentley, had been caned in front of his pupils and fled to New Orleans, and the killing of Black Republicans followed. A Baptist school that opened here in 1897 came after those losses, and it met in a church, not a public schoolhouse.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 0.9 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 21 mi
  A National Park Service center in Eunice on the Cajun prairie, with exhibits on the Acadians who settled the prairies, a Courir de Mardi Gras display, free music and cooking demonstrations, and the shuttered Liberty Theatre nearby.
• Vermilionville — 23 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 26 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.

More markers nearby

• Lt. Fr. Joseph "Verbis" Lafleur — 0.2 mi
• St. Landry Catholic Church — 0.2 mi
• Opelousas Catholic School — 0.4 mi
• Lawyers Row — 0.6 mi