Major General Delesseps S. "Chep" Morrisson

deLesseps Morrison was born in New Roads in 1912 and served as mayor of New Orleans from 1946 to 1961. His record on race was mixed. He publicly defended segregation, and during the 1960 school desegregation crisis he did not stop mobs from intimidating Black children and their families. President Kennedy appointed him ambassador to the Organization of American States, a post he held from 1961 to 1963. He died on May 22, 1964 in a plane crash at Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, with his son Randy.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 8.2 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 8.9 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 10 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 21 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré — steps away
• Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune — steps away
• Julien Poydras — steps away
• John Archer LeJeune — steps away