Dedicated in Honor of Christiana Gordon Smith

Christiana Smith became the first Black graduate of Southwestern Louisiana Institute in May 1956, two years after the first Black students enrolled. Black students then commuted by bus and kept to the edges of campus life. In April 1956, a month before her graduation, an integrated Gulf States Newman Club meeting at the Catholic Student Center was one of the first integrated campus functions. President Joel Fletcher, Father Alexander Sigur and Dean Glynn Abel are credited with easing the transition, and a faculty-student human relations council was formed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 1.3 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.0 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 13 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

• Amédé Ardoin / Dennis McGee — 0.2 mi
• McNaspy Stadium Memorial — 0.3 mi
• Pillars of Progress (Desegregation of SLI) — 0.3 mi
• James Domengeaux — 0.4 mi