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Friend,
Center Street in New Iberia, Louisiana, has seen better days. Once the main highway into town from neighboring Abbeville, it begins at Main Street near the Shadows-on-the-Teche plantation and stretches west, forming the edge of the city’s business district before passing in front of the former New Iberia High School, which now serves as senior living apartments and an after-school program site.
Tucked away behind the Classic Revival-style brick school is Lloyd G. Porter Memorial Stadium. Decommissioned in 2014, it still stands ready, the grass and building maintained for occasional use in case newer facilities become flooded or otherwise unavailable. Built in 1939, the stadium is named after the longtime Iberia Parish Schools superintendent during whose tenure it was built.
But the fact that the facility still bears Porter’s name is a problem for many in the Black community because of the role Porter played in the expulsion of Black physicians and leaders from the city in 1944.
As with many memorials, such as those honoring Confederate generals, politicians and others known for their role in the “Lost Cause,” the actions of people memorialized in towns such as New Iberia sometimes tarnish quickly in the light of history.
“I’m not as concerned about former plantation owners as I am about the 20th century segregationists of this community who terrorized New Iberia’s Black citizens for demanding the same opportunities as white citizens,” said Phebe Hayes, a retired professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and founder of the Iberia African American Historical Society. “Black men were actually beaten and murdered in Iberia Parish for exercising the right to vote and demanding access to better jobs and education. In so many former Jim Crow towns like ours, the perpetrators of such violence are honored to this day with streets and public buildings bearing their names.”
“This shouldn’t be a complicated process,” said Tafeni English, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama. “Buildings, streets, schools or other public spaces should not be named after people who had a role in perpetuating violence on communities of color. The work we do at the Civil Rights Memorial Center is not only to educate and deepen the understanding of the past civil rights movement, but it also aims to connect that history to today’s progressive social movements to advance economic and racial justice.”
Fighting for knowledge
During one week in May 1944, a dozen Black citizens were forced to leave New Iberia. Among them were four doctors and four civil rights leaders — physicians Eddie L. Dorsey, Howard C. Scoggins and Luins Williams; dentist Ima A. Pierson; and community leaders Herman Faulk, J. Leo Hardy, Octave Lilly Jr. and Franzella Volter. Several of them were severely beaten before being dumped at the city limits. Hardy would die within months from his wounds, while Pierson would go through life with a metal plate in his skull because of his beating at the hands of Iberia Parish deputies.
The impetus for those attacks came after a chapter of the NAACP was established in the summer of 1943. It was at the height of World War II, and skilled welders were at a premium. The NAACP chapter, led by Hardy as its president, supported the idea of establishing a school where Black students could learn to weld, creating the first conflict with Porter, the school superintendent.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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