Royal Cyril Brooks

Royal Cyril Brooks was 44, a father of three who worked at a fertilizer plant in Harvey, when white Gretna patrolman Alvin Bladsacker struck him and shot him twice on February 27, 1948. No weapon was found on him. A committee that included the Louisiana Seafood Workers Council, NAACP branches and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters demanded prosecution, and the Civil Rights Congress wrote to President Truman. An all-white jury acquitted Bladsacker in seven minutes in June 1949; the Justice Department closed its file that September, and he stayed on the police force.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 1.4 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 — 2.5 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 2.7 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.
• The Cabildo — 2.7 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Mechanickham — steps away
• Gretna City Hall — steps away
• Stumpf's Magic Hoodoo — steps away
• Centennial Marker — steps away