McDonogh No. 7 Elementary School

John McDonogh, who enslaved people, died in 1850 and left most of his fortune to Baltimore and New Orleans for schools; New Orleans received about $704,000 in 1858 after heirs contested the will. More than thirty schools came to bear his name, and the white and Black ones were separate and unequal. Each year on his birthday, children laid flowers at his statue in Lafayette Square, white pupils first while Black pupils waited in the heat. On May 7, 1954, educators Revis Ortique Jr. and Arthur Chapital organized a boycott of the ceremony by Black students and teachers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 0.9 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 3.0 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 3.0 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 Historic New Orleans Collection — 3.1 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

• Halfway Station — 0.3 mi
• Faubourg Bouligny — 0.3 mi
• Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University — 0.8 mi
• Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) — 0.8 mi