Woodlawn High School and the Struggle for Racial Equality

Leander Perez ran Plaquemines for about five decades and fought desegregation with the parish's oil money. Archbishop Rummel excommunicated him in April 1962 for obstructing integration, and he closed public schools and opened all-white academies. After the Justice Department sued in 1966, Judge Christenberry ordered Perez and others not to obstruct compliance, and Perez, arguing the parish's side himself, called integration worse than a hurricane. About thirty Black students were eventually sent to Woodlawn; its teachers resigned and it never reopened. The case was closed administratively in 1975 and dismissed in 2025.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Barataria Preserve — 6.0 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park unit of bayou, swamp and marsh on the site of a Chitimacha and Houma shell-mound landscape, with the visitor center and most trails closed for about two years of repairs.
• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 12 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.
• Chalmette Battlefield — 12 mi
  The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Mary Plantation — 3.0 mi
• Bethlehem Baptist Church School — 3.5 mi
• Bellechasse Plantation — 6.4 mi
• Poblacion de Barataria (Barataria Settlement) — 6.5 mi