J. Leo Hardy

Hardy was the first president of New Iberia's NAACP chapter, formed in the summer of 1943. While the welding school was fought over, he wrote to federal agencies for help. In mid-May 1944 Sheriff Gilbert Ozenne and Superintendent Lloyd Porter told him to leave town. The next evening deputies seized him, beat him and left him outside the city. Friends in Lafayette helped him, and he took a train to Monroe but died within months; his family tied his death to the beating. No federal charges followed. The football stadium built under Porter still carried his name in 2022.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.8 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 — 7.9 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 — 8.0 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

• Queen Mother Moore - African Liberation Leader — steps away
• The Erath Building — 0.4 mi
• Eddie L. Dorsey, MD; Ima Pierson, DDS; Howard C. Scoggins, MD; Luins Williams, MD — 0.4 mi
• The Episcopal Church Of The Epiphany — 0.5 mi