3121 Pauger St
New Orleans, LA 70119, USA

A.P. Tureaud Sr., House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:

The house at 3121 Pauger Street is of statewide significance as the home of Louisiana’s preeminent civil rights attorney, A. P. Tureaud. As legal counsel for the NAACP for more than three decades, Tureaud pursued his firm belief in the primacy of the legal process in the fight against discrimination. Louisiana civil rights historian Adam Fairclough writes of Tureaud: “The dean of civil rights lawyers in Louisiana . . . , his name appeared on virtually every suit filed by the NAACP; working with Thurgood Marshall, he integrated schools, universities, buses, parks, and public buildings; he won voting rights suits; he equalized the salaries of black teachers.” “A. P. Tureaud’s career as a lawyer and activist,” believes Fairclough, “formed the most important strand of the complex fabric that made up the civil rights movement in Louisiana.” The well over 100 cases he argued, or helped to argue, concludes Barbara Worthy, “essentially compromise the totality of significant litigation involving the struggle for civil rights in Louisiana.

Tureaud lived at 3121 Pauger, with his family, from 1947 until his death in 1972 - during the height of his civil rights career - when virtually all his important cases were pursued. The period of significance begins in 1947, when he moved into the house, and ends in 1969, the date of his last civil rights litigation. Tureaud was particularly busy in the mid-1960s, filing 38 cases in a four year period (1963-1966). He filed 19 cases in 1965 alone. Five cases were filed between 1967 and 1969. The case for “exceptional importance” (National Register Criteria Consideration G, in this instance, for events that occurred less than 50 years ago) is addressed at the end of Part 8.

Biographical Highlights:
The following will provide a biographical overview of A. P. Tureaud. Highlights of his legal career are provided in the section following.

Alexander Pierre Tureaud (or A. P. as he styled himself) was born in New Orleans on February 26, 1899 to Louis and Eugenie Tureaud. Louis was a self-employed carpenter. A. P. Tureaud’s maternal grandfather was a free person of color born in Louisiana, and his maternal grandmother was of “mixed Indian heritage” (the term Tureaud used in later comments about his ancestry). He did not know either of his paternal grandparents. A. P.’s early years were spent at 907 Kerlerec Street, in the Seventh Ward, the heart of the city’s Creole community. (Here the term Creole refers to a person of mixed ancestry.) Like other Creoles, he attended St. Augustine Catholic Church. Tureaud completed eight grades of schooling in New Orleans. (There was no education available to blacks beyond the eighth grade until 1917, by which time Tureaud had left the city.)

In 1916, at age 17, Tureaud traveled to Chicago, where he worked a few months. Then he relocated to New York to join relatives already living there. (His parents separated when he was about thirteen. His father moved to New York.) After about a year, A. P. moved to Washington D. C., where he completed his high school education. He entered the Howard University Law School in 1922, receiving a bachelor of law degree with honors in June 1925.

Tureaud returned to New Orleans soon thereafter, taking a job at the Custom House and pursuing a limited private law practice on the side. (He would remain at the Custom House until 1941.) When admitted to the Louisiana Bar in 1927, Tureaud was one of only five black attorneys in the state. (At times he would be the only black attorney practicing regularly in Louisiana.)

In 1931 Tureaud married Lucille Dejoie, from one of the city’s established black Creole families. She had recently received a degree in pharmacy from Howard University. The couple’s first home was at 1975 N. Rocheblave, also in the Seventh Ward. They bought the candidate in 1947. Tureaud’s earliest civil rights cases date from the early-1940s. The vast majority date from his residency at the candidate.

Tureaud began his forty-five-year association with the New Orleans branch of the NAACP in 1927, becoming a member of the Board of Directors. In 1931 he resigned from the chapter’s executive committee in a disagreement over the use of white attorneys rather than African-Americans. The national office rejected his request to charter a rival branch. Tureaud went back into the fold. Then, in 1939-1940, he was among the “Young Turks” (or “The Group,” as they called themselves) who sought to gain control of the local chapter’s executive committee. They did not win. -Believing that the existing black press was too conservative, “The Group” launched a short-lived paper called the New Orleans Sentinel. Tureaud contributed copy, including occasional editorials. Historian Adam Fairclough labels the Sentinel “left of center and pro-labor.”

Tureaud’s “Young Turk” phase in the New Orleans NAACP might well be surprising to a younger generation of New Orleans civil rights activists who at times considered their mentor to be too conservative. The A. P. Tureaud of 1950s and ‘60s civil rights litigation was no firebrand. He was an unobtrusive, lowkey man who believed that change would come through the law. “As long as he [Tureaud] could do so without compromising his principles,” writes Fairclough, “he would bend over backward to appear reasonable and moderate. Tureaud’s palpable fairness, and his unfailing courtesy, won him universal respect.”

Tureaud did not agree with the new strategies of non-violent direct action such as sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Judge Revius Ortique, a former Louisiana Supreme Court justice, was one of the younger 1960s activists interviewed in “Journey to Justice,” a Louisiana Public Broadcasting documentary on Tureaud’s career (Rachel Emanuel, producer). Ortique relates Tureaud’s scolding after he, Ortique, protested Jim Crow segregation by refusing to use a restroom designated for blacks. “If you lose your license to practice law,” chided Tureaud, “you will not be able to help anyone.” On another occasion, Tureaud observed, “I’ve never had to put on one single demonstration and I’ve gotten all these things.” Tureaud son, A. P., Jr., remembers many a spirited discussion with his father over tactics.

In fact, what may have seemed like conservatism to early ‘60s demonstrators most definitely was not. Within the context of the times, it was indeed radical to take on the system in any manner (as Judge Constance Baker Motley so astutely noted in “Journey to Justice”). Being “Mr. NAACP” in Louisiana took tremendous courage and dedication. Tureaud’s life was in danger as he traveled the state investigating discrimination and violence for the NAACP and then taking appropriate legal action.

After a career of civil rights litigation that lasted until the late-1960s, Tureaud retired in 1971. In addition to his work as an attorney, he had to his credit a lifetime of activism in many phases of the NAACP’s work. In 1948 he and several like-minded individuals came together to establish the Orleans Parish Progressive Voters’ League. He raised funds for the NAACP, spoke at branch meetings, served four years as president of the statewide organization (the Louisiana State Conference of NAACP Branches), and championed the NAACP to black Catholics. He participated in voter registration drives and helped to organize the black vote. In 1958, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress.

Cancer claimed A. P. Tureaud on January 22, 1972. Delivering a eulogy at the funeral mass was long-time associate and United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. “In this age of civil rights,” observed Justice Marshall, “we got where we are today by the efforts and dedication of men like A. P. Tureaud, who made himself a leader.” “That man’s courage was unbelievable.” In honor of his contributions, the City of New Orleans renamed London Avenue (in the Seventh Ward) to A. P. Tureaud Avenue and created a small triangular memorial park where A. P. Tureaud and St. Bernard avenues intersect. A life-size bronze statue of Tureaud is shown opening the gates of opportunity. A school has also been renamed in his honor.

A. P. and Lucille Tureaud raised six children in the candidate. Mrs. Tureaud lived there until her death in the early 1990s. As explained in Part 7, their daughter Janet occupied the house until Hurricane Katrina (August 29, 2005).

Civil Rights Legal Career (Highlights)
While A. P. Tureaud made contributions in various fields of civil rights litigation, his main work was in education. His earliest education work involved teacher salary equalization suits. With Thurgood Marshall from the national offices of NAACP as his mentor, Tureaud filed suit against the Orleans Parish School Board in June 1941 to equalize salaries. When the school board proposed equalization over a three-year period, the more experienced Marshall advised Tureaud against accepting what he considered a ploy. Tureaud took Marshall’s advice and rejected the three-year plan. He won an agreement to equalize salaries by September 1943. Encouraged by this success, Tureaud, as local attorney for the NAACP and the Louisiana Colored Teacher’s Association, sought teachers in other parishes who were willing to file suit against their employers (no easy task given the threats of retaliation). Other equalization cases Tureaud argued, in 1942 and 1943 with mixed results, were in East Baton Rouge, Iberville and Jefferson parishes.

Following the strategy of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Tureaud used the courts to attack segregation in educational facilities by first targeting graduate and professional programs in colleges and universities. He lost his first two suits, filed in 1946 against the law and medical schools at Louisiana State University. Then he scored three victories in the early 1950s, opening LSU’s law, medical and graduate schools to blacks. (In these and other cases, Tureaud was not the sole attorney. His and Thurgood Marshall’s names are typically found on suits, with Tureaud as the local attorney and Marshall representing the national offices of the Legal Defense Fund.)

The next “target” was the undergraduate school at LSU. In 1953 Tureaud filed suit to admit his son, A. P. Tureaud, Jr., as a freshman. Presumably because of A. P. Sr.’s personal involvement, the case was handled by attorneys from the NAACP’s national office, with Antoine M. Trudeau, Jr. serving as local attorney. The ensuing complex legal wrangling was not finally settled until 1956, to Tureaud’s favor. (Tureaud, Jr. actually attended LSU only a short while in the fall of 1953. He was told to leave when the original order was vacated. By the Time the attorneys for the plaintiff won “round two” of several more rounds, A. P. Jr. had enrolled at Xavier University, a black Catholic school in New Orleans.) With the legal way paved in the 1956 court case, African-Americans began attending the undergraduate division of LSU in 1960.

Soon after the United States Supreme Court’s momentous Brown ruling of May 17, 1954, federal courts decided for the plaintiffs in three other higher education suits filed by Tureaud, ordering the desegregation of Southwestern Louisiana Institute, Lafayette; McNeese State College, Lake Charles; and Southeastern Louisiana College in Hammond.

Easily Tureaud’s longest legal battle was to desegregate New Orleans public schools. Bushv. the Orleans Parish School Board was in litigation for an entire decade, from 1952 to 1962. All in all, it involved forty-one separate judicial decisions, including six instances of the U. S. Supreme Court affirming the federal court. Like those that were joined in Brown, the Bush case attacked segregation head-on, calling for the repudiation of the separate-but-equal doctrine. Tureaud filed the case September 5, 1952. (He and Thurgood Marshall were the attorneys for the plaintiffs.) By mutual agreement with the national office, the local NAACP branch agreed to not press Bush until the United States Supreme Court had ruled on the five cases joined in Brown. Immediately after the second Brown decision (1955), Tureaud reactivated Bush. The first ruling came in February 1956, when a three-judge U. S. District Court ruled that segregation in public school was invalid under Brown.

What ensued was one of the nation’s major battles in court-ordered desegregation. Easily the subject of a book, the New Orleans school crisis of 1960-61 will be briefly summarized for the purpose of this document. Some four years after the 1956 decision, the New Orleans School Board still had not developed a desegregation plan. On May 16, 1960, after the board failed to meet its latest deadline. Judge Skelly Wright ordered the public schools of New Orleans to desegregate under a plan of his choosing. A complicated battle between the federal courts and the State of Louisiana raged in the summer of 1960. As fast as the state legislature passed a law or Governor Jimmie Davis issued an executive order aimed to stall desegregation, the courts struck it down. Token desegregation came on November 14, 1960, when four female first-graders entered two schools in the city, with federal marshals to protect them from the abusive crowds.

During this extremely tense period, the FBI maintained a presence outside 3121 Pauger to protect Tureaud and his family from retaliation. He and family members later related the hate mail and threatening phone calls they received at the candidate. When racists called during the night, A. P. typically dropped the receiver on the floor. His children recall blowing a whistle into the phone. His daughters, whose bedrooms were in the front of the house, were particularly jumpy because of bomb threats. A. P. Tureaud, Jr. relates one occasion when his sisters were terrified when something smashed through the window with a loud noise. Instead of a bomb, it was an innocent baseball.

Tureaud was particularly busy in the mid-1960s with public school desegregation cases filed against various parish school boards. He filed 5 such cases in 1963, 4 in 1964, 17 in 1965, and 4 in 1966. Perhaps appropriately, the last case he filed, in 1969, was in public education.

While his caseload was not large, Tureaud’s work in desegregation of public accommodations was notable. Like case after case across the nation, Tureaud’s litigation was aimed at making Brown and its implications a reality. On February 1, 1957 he filed a class action suit in federal district court to end segregation on the buses and streetcars of New Orleans. He won this and similar suits filed to desegregate public transportation in Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Shreveport. Although opposed philosophically to the direct-action sit-in movement, he defended Southern University students arrested after sit-ins in Baton Rouge in late March 1960. (To quote one historian, he was against them breaking the law, but “once they did, he did not hesitate to defend them.”) The Baton Rouge sit-in cases eventually went to the U. S. Supreme Court under one name. Gamer v. Louisiana. In a decision handed down December 11, 1961, the court unanimously reversed the conviction of all sixteen petitioners. {Gamer v. Louisiana, handled by Tureaud, Baton Rouge attorney Johnnie A. Jones, and staff from the New York NAACP office, was the first sit-in case to reach the U. S. Supreme Court.)

In 1963 Tureaud filed, and won, three public accommodations suit in New Orleans: hotels; the Municipal Auditorium; and public parks, playgrounds, and the like. His last public accommodations suit came in 1967, when he filed suit against the segregation of the races in places where alcohol was sold or consumed.

A.P. Tureaud. Mentor
The older Tureaud served as a mentor to a rising generation of black leaders, most notably Reyius Ortique and Ernest Morial. Ortique went on to become the first African-American justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court (1992), and Ernest Morial, New Orleans’ first African-American mayor.

Ortique was mentored by Tureaud as a young lawyer. He recalled: “A number of us, every Saturday, went over to Mr. Tureaud’s office, and just talked about the practice of law. A. P. Tureaud’s office was always available. He had the best law library amongst any of the black lawyers and we would go over there and pick up a sandwich and a soft drink and just talk. And this went on for several years. Just talk, and I got a sense of the civil rights movement then."

Tureaud had a particularly close relationship with Ernest Morial, whom he befriended while Morial attended the recently desegregated LSU Law School. According to Morial, Tureaud hoped to get more black lawyers” regularly practicing in Louisiana, and so tried to find “young lawyers to mentor, and who could succeed him.” Morial practiced law in Tureaud’s office, working on some of the state’s most important civil rights litigation. He served two terms as mayor of New Orleans (1978-1986).

Buildings Associated with A. P. Tureaud
The buildings where Tureaud had law offices have been demolished. His childhood home survives as does the home in lived in during his early career, until he bought 3121 Pauger in 1947. Of these, 3121 Pauger is where Tureaud lived during the vast majority of his productive career as the state’s preeminent civil rights attorney. As noted above, it was at 3121 Pauger that the FBI posted agents during the 1960-61 New Orleans School Crisis. It was here, over a period of 20 years, that Tureaud and his family received all manner of threatening letters and phone calls. As Tureaud himself said in an interview, “It was almost a daily and nightly experience for me to get threats at home.” Indeed, the modest residence at 3121 Pauger has a powerful connection with the civil rights movement in Louisiana.

Exceptional Importance:
The National Register requires that properties be of “exceptional importance” if their significance occurred less than 50 years ago. Some of the modern Civil Rights Movement is now fifty years old and some is not - likewise for Tureaud’s long career of civil rights litigation. It would be arbitrary to define some of his career historic and some not. Where would you draw the line? It all helps tell the same story. (Per National Register Bulletin 22, “Guidelines for Evaluating and Nominating Properties That Have Achieved Significance Within the Last Fifty Years,” the 50 year threshold was not designed “to be mechanically applied on a year by year basis. Generally, our understanding of history^does not advance a year at a time, but rather in periods of time which can logically be examined together.”) And of critical importance is the fact that enough time has passed for scholarly studies to be published on the civil rights movement in Louisiana and A. P. Tureaud’s role in it.

Perhaps the best argument for “exceptional importance” rests on the historical force represented in this nomination; the modern Civil Rights movement. No one would dispute that this extraordinary movement is of “exceptional importance” in American history. African-Americans, aided by the courts and pivotal legislation, re-gained the fundamental rights secured some one hundred years ago during Reconstruction. Surely, the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War are the two most important historical phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century. As the home of Louisiana’s foremost civil rights attorney, a man whose name appears everywhere on litigation for decades, the house at 3121 Pauger, at the state level, meets the “exceptional importance” litmus test.