Episode 2

A.P. Tureaud, Jr.

This episode discusses the integration of LSU, the first all-white State University in the South to admit an African-American student. Mr. A. P. Tureaud Jr. successfully sued LSU to gain entry in 1953. Mr. Tureaud attended LSU for 55 days that year, one year before Brown versus Board of Education toppled the separate but equal doctrine established by the Plessy versus Ferguson decision in 1896, which made segregation the legal system in the Southern United States.

Mr. Tureaud describes the choice to attend LSU as the worst mistake he ever made, and marvels nearly 70 years later at the meanness that people displayed towards him, especially the faculty and other adults. This is the first of several interrelated stories about Mr. Tureaud and his extended family. Mr. Tureaud comes from two New Orleans based Black Creole families. The Dejoie clan, his mom's side, founded Louisiana Weekly and include a number of pharmacists, including the first Black female pharmacist in the state, Lucille Dejoie Tureaud, his mother.

The Dejoies lived uptown and had a large extended family. His father's side, the Tureauds, lived downtown along Esplanade Avenue at Kerlerec Street and there were no familial connections outside his immediate family, a mystery that would only make sense later in life. His father became a prominent civil rights attorney, winning a case to equalize teacher pay in Louisiana, before he began practicing full-time at the behest of Thurgood Marshall and others at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

As his father's traveling companion, Mr. Tureaud frequently went through LSU and Southern, and saw the differences between the state's flagship undergraduate institutions for White and Black students respectively. As he finished at Clark High School, he decided to attend LSU and won the right to do so. The conversation today is focused on that story, A. P.'s story of unequal opportunity in America.

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