Historical Marker
Jonas Henderson
New Iberia, Iberia County · Louisiana
The school named for Jonas Henderson opened on January 9, 1950, on Anderson Street. It was planned as New Iberia Colored High School, but the name was changed at opening to honor him, and his son, J. B. Henderson, was principal. A new campus opened on Jefferson Island Road in 1967. In July 1969 the district announced the school would close. In August Black students protested and marched back to the former campus, where police used tear gas; the episode drew national coverage, and Iberia Parish integrated in September.
Where it stands
30.00137, -91.84255 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Shadows-on-the-Teche — 1.6 miA 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.
- Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 7.6 miA 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.
- African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.4 miA 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 — 8.4 miThe 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.