The C.O.R.E. March

On December 14, 1961, police arrested 23 Southern University students who had picketed a segregated restaurant. The next day the Rev. B. Elton Cox led about 2,000 people to the courthouse where they were held, kept across the street by agreement. White onlookers gathered opposite. When Cox urged the crowd to sit at downtown lunch counters, police fired tear gas. He was arrested at a church the next day and sentenced to one year and nine months and a $5,700 fine. A film of the protest, peaceful until police moved, helped win reversal in January 1965.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 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.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 4.9 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

• Garner v. Louisiana — steps away
• Pioneers of the Bus Boycott — steps away
• Alvin Batiste — steps away
• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — steps away