E. J. Edmunds, school integration, and white supremacist backlash in Reconstruction New Orleans

Abstract

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a "negro" as a teacher of "white youths." Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual elite in exercising the political power they held under Radical Reconstruction to strip racial designations from public schools. White supremacist Redeemers responded with a vicious propaganda campaign to define, differentiate, and diminish the "negro race." Edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in the New Orleans public schools first as a student and then as a teacher, and the details of his life show the impact on ordinary Afro-Creoles as the city's warring politicians used the public schools both to undermine and reinforce the racial order.