Fannie C. Williams / Valena C. Jones Elementary School

The school's name belongs to a teacher who never saw it. Valena Cecilia MacArthur was born in 1872 in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, graduated from Straight University in 1892 and led the Black school in her hometown until 1897. She taught in New Orleans, where she was voted the city's most popular Black teacher and received a bicycle. After marrying the Rev. Robert R. Jones in 1901 she helped him edit the Southwestern Christian Advocate for about twelve years. She died in January 1917, at 44, a year before the school took her name.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 1.3 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.4 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Cabildo — 1.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.6 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Faubourg Tremé — 0.8 mi
• Fair Grounds Race Course — 0.9 mi
• Tomb of the Unknown Slave — 1.0 mi
• Saint Augustine Church, New Orleans — 1.0 mi