Southern University

The school's story is bracketed by two numbers. In 1879 P. B. S. Pinchback, Theophile Allain and Henry Demas proposed a college for Black students at the constitutional convention. It was chartered in 1880 and opened on March 7, 1881 with twelve students. On November 16, 1972, two students, Denver Smith and Leonard Brown, were shot with buckshot during a protest outside the Old Auditorium; the killings were never solved. Governor Edwin Edwards closed the campus for a time. The Southern University System was created in 1974.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — 4.4 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• Capitol Park Museum — 4.6 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Old State Capitol — 5.2 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 8.5 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Julia Brogdon Purnell — 1.0 mi
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — 1.0 mi
• Scott's Bluff — 1.1 mi
• Ceremonial Indian Mound — 4.3 mi