Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet

Her father, Samuel Wakefield, was a state senator and teacher who ran a school for Black children until a tornado wrecked it in 1874. In January 1889 his younger son, Samuel Wakefield Jr., about 17, was taken from the New Iberia jail and lynched by a white mob that blamed him for the shooting death of James Trainor, a white shop owner. The mob terrorized the family home, the father died days later, and the family fled to New Orleans. Emma sat the state medical board exam there on April 15, 1897, the only woman among 68 candidates.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.2 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 — 8.1 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 — 8.1 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 — 8.7 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

• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away
• The Steamboat Era — steps away
• Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away