Gilbert Academy & New Orleans University
New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
5318 St. Charles Avenue. The site of Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University, Black Educational Institutions. Under the auspices of the Methodist Church, 1873 to 1949. Erected by Gilbert Academy Alumni Association, 1993.
Erected by Gilbert Academy Alumni Association
The Story
This St. Charles Avenue site was home to New Orleans University and Gilbert Academy, Black educational institutions run under the Methodist Church from 1873 to 1949. Founded in the years after emancipation, they offered schooling to African American students across generations. The Gilbert Academy Alumni Association erected the marker in 1993 to keep that legacy visible.
Why it matters
These schools were part of the vital network of Black education that took root in the Reconstruction South and shaped African American opportunity for decades.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Latter Memorial Library
New Orleans, LA · est. 1976
This stately mansion on New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue was recognized on October 21, 1976, when the Department of the Interior placed the Latter Memorial Library on the National Register of Historic Places. Serving the public as a branch library, the building preserves the grandeur of the avenue's early twentieth-century residential architecture. The bronze plaque records its formal listing among the nation's protected historic places.
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
New Orleans, LA
This memorial in downtown New Orleans honors the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who led the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His campaigns for voting rights, desegregation, and economic justice reshaped the American South before his assassination in 1968.
Heinemann Park / Pelican Stadium
New Orleans, LA
From 1915 to 1957, this ground held Heinemann Park, later Pelican Stadium, home of New Orleans' first professional sports team, the baseball Pelicans. Negro league clubs such as the Black Pelicans and Creoles also played their home games here, and the field hosted spring training and exhibitions featuring Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson. For four decades it was the heart of the city's baseball life.
John Kennedy Toole
New Orleans, LA
New Orleans author John Kennedy Toole created Ignatius J. Reilly, the unforgettable misanthrope of 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' whose opening scene unfolds beneath the clock at the old D.H. Holmes department store on Canal Street. Toole died before the novel found a publisher; his mother championed the manuscript, and it appeared in 1980. In 1981 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.