In September 1916 H. L. Billiot, a man of Bayou Dularge in Terrebonne Parish, took his three sons to Falgout School. Billiot had gone to school near Montegut in the 1890s, and the superintendent, H. L. Bourgeois, had given permission for Harry, 12, Walter, 10, and Paul, 8, to attend an all-white elementary school. On September 13 a teacher turned the boys away. Bourgeois said several parents had petitioned against mixed-race children in the school. He offered Billiot a choice: the Black school, or withdraw the boys from the system. Billiot answered that segregation required separate but equal schools and that the Black schools were not equal.
The trial
The case, number 7876, reached the 20th Judicial District Court in Houma on February 3, 1917. The school board first claimed Billiot had African ancestry. When it could not prove it, it turned to his wife, Celasie Frederick Billiot, and her maternal grandfather, Etienne "King" Billiot Jr., asking whether his paternal grandmother had been Spanish, and so legally white, or African. On March 26 the judge ruled for the board. The court acknowledged that both parents were of Native American and white descent, but the board's lawyers needed only to argue that King Billiot might have had African ancestry.
Billiot appealed the same day. In April 1918 the Louisiana Supreme Court declined the case because the damages, figured at about ten dollars a month per child in lost schooling, fell under its $2,000 minimum. For legal purposes the Billiots were reclassified from Houma to African American. The ruling effectively closed white schools to Houma children, and the Houma refused to send them to Black schools, because that would have meant giving up their Houma identity.
Schools of their own
Private groups opened small schools, usually ending at sixth grade. The Methodists held their first class at Dulac on October 1, 1932, in an old dance hall. A school for Indian children had stood at Montegut since 1920. By the late 1950s the Houma could attend Indian schools through seventh grade. The tribal elder Whitney Dardar remembered that the Indian school at Golden Meadow, opened in the 1940s, did not have all the books. Helen Duplantis, who attended, said French was the community's main language and students learned English from their teachers. Jeanette Billiot said, "We were treated like outcasts." Joyce Bouvier, a tribal member, loved school but could not go past the seventh grade. "I wanted to keep learning, but I couldn't," she told the Bridge the Gulf Project.
Daigleville School in Houma was, according to the United Houma Nation, the one public school in the parish where Indian students could earn a high school diploma in the 1960s. Houma children entered public schools in March 1963, after Naquin v. Terrebonne Parish School Board, and a federal court approved a plan in 1964 to desegregate the white and Indian schools.
The Montegut school still stands, closed since a 2009 fire and listed as endangered in 2024. In Houma, the Terrebonne Museum at Southdown stands in the parish where this played out, and the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center in Thibodaux tells how others came to these bayous.