Dr. Julia Brogdon Purnell

Purnell, born in 1916, was the eldest of three daughters of a minister. She took her bachelor's degree at Allen University and her master's at Atlanta University, and taught education at Southern University. As Alpha Kappa Alpha's sixteenth international president, from 1962 to 1966, she helped win a federal contract for the Cleveland Job Corps for women, set up the sorority's first national program office in Washington, and convened its first Undergraduate Leadership School in 1965. She later led the Links as its seventh president and held nine honorary doctorates.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — 4.4 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• Capitol Park Museum — 4.7 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Old State Capitol — 5.1 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 9.0 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — steps away
• Scott's Bluff — steps away
• Southern University — 1.0 mi
• Ceremonial Indian Mound — 4.4 mi