Marie Couvent could not read or write, and she never saw the school she paid for. She was born in Africa around 1757, and her will recalled being shipped as a child to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where she was enslaved. She fled the revolution there and reached New Orleans, though how she became free is unknown. By 1806 she owned two lots in the city, and on October 27, 1812 she married Bernard Couvent, a free Black carpenter. She likely sold textile goods at the market. Bernard died on May 22, 1829.
Freedom and ownership
Her record is not tidy. Over her lifetime Couvent owned at least twenty-three enslaved people. She freed three women and still held five when she died. In 1821 she and Bernard petitioned for the freedom of a woman named Pauline. When Bernard died, petitions for two more women, Seraphine and Fillette, were still pending, and Marie refiled them in 1831. Her will, recorded in 1832, left her land at Grands Hommes and Union streets, now Dauphine and Touro, for a free school for the colored orphans of the Faubourg Marigny, to last in perpetuity. She died on June 28, 1837.
Eleven years
Her executor, Henry Fletcher, never built the school, mainly because city officials opposed it. Father Constantine Maenhaut then enlisted François Lacroix, and ten Afro-Creole men, among them the poet Armand Lanusse, formed the Society for the Instruction of Indigent Orphans. They sued for the estate and won a final ruling in 1846. The state chartered them in 1847, and the school opened in rented rooms in the Marigny in 1848 with Félice Coulon Cailloux as its first principal.
The permanent building went up in 1852 with Lanusse as headmaster, a post he held until his death in 1867. About three hundred pupils were enrolled through the 1850s: orphans free, others paying modest tuition. The faculty were all Afro-Creoles, many educated in France, and Paul Trevigne is said to have taught there for about forty years. The estate could not carry the costs, so mutual aid societies took up collections in the cemeteries on All Souls' Day and gave charity balls. Arthur Esteves, the board's president, was one of the men who brought the Plessy suit, and the philanthropist Thomy Lafon left money for a new building when he died in 1893.
The name
A hurricane destroyed the building in 1915. Katharine Drexel built a new school on the site under the Sisters of the Holy Ghost, called St. Louis School of the Holy Redeemer, and one account says that ended the school's Afro-Creole intellectual role. Holy Redeemer closed in 1993. Bishop Perry Middle School, the fourth school on the site, closed after Hurricane Katrina. In 1940 a public school in the Marigny was named for Couvent. In the 1990s, during a campaign to rename schools honoring slaveholders, it was renamed for A. P. Tureaud because she had owned enslaved people.
The Dauphine Street site is not a visit. Homer Plessy lies in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, open only with a licensed guide, and the Louisiana Supreme Court heard his case in the Cabildo on Jackson Square.