Eddie L. Dorsey, MD; Ima Pierson, DDS; Howard C. Scoggins, MD; Luins Williams, MD

A welding school started it. In the war's labor shortage, the new NAACP chapter backed a night class for Black students, and funding was approved in March 1944. The Iberia Parish schools superintendent, Lloyd G. Porter, cut the first session short, citing noise that bothered white neighbors, then moved classes to daytime hours when workers could not attend. On May 17, deputies beat Herman Faulk, Dr. Ima Pierson and Dr. Luins Williams and drove them out; Pierson was left with a metal plate in his skull. Dr. Howard Scoggins barricaded his home overnight, then fled to Lafayette.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.5 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.2 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 — 8.2 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.4 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.

More markers nearby

• Howe Institute — steps away
• Ambassador Wilbert John Le Melle — 0.2 mi
• Saint Peter Roman Catholic Church — 0.3 mi
• Essanee Theater — 0.3 mi