Natchitoches residents fought hard for civil rights

Next City reports that during the civil rights era, activists in Natchitoches sent coded messages to movement leaders in other cities through mail bags on the midnight train. Passenger service ended in 1969 and freight in 1982, closing that channel. The National Park Service, which leases the depot from the city, lists it as the thirteenth stop on the Louisiana Civil Rights Trail. The article says the reopened building now carries exhibits on the Black experience in Natchitoches Parish from the colonial period through the movement.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.6 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Architecture of Segregation — steps away
• The Texas and Pacific Railroad Depot — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — 0.4 mi
• First Mass in Natchitoches — 0.4 mi