John McDonogh’s bequest upon his death in 1850 gave the nascent New Orleans public school system a bricks-and-mortar base. He donated half of his fortune for schools for the free children “of both sexes and all classes and castes of color.”
The schools, most named for their donor, began being built before the Civil War; the fund lasted until the 1970s.
The McDonogh No. 1 school on Laurel Street was one of the three schools built from McDonogh’s bequest before the Civil War, and was the first to be named after him. Eventually, more than 30 schools were built in New Orleans and in McDonoghville, which straddled Orleans and Jefferson parishes on the West Bank.
By the early 1970s, there were 20 McDonogh schools remaining in New Orleans. In the 1990s, many of those schools were renamed in a movement to remove the names of slaveholders from New Orleans’ public schools.
McDonogh’s request that the children place flowers on his statue every year evolved into the annual celebration known as McDonogh Day. Processions of bouquet-bearing white public school children would place flowers at the Lafayette Square monument honoring benefactor John McDonogh in the annual
McDonogh Day ceremonies.
Since its inception, there were separate ceremonies for white and black children. But in 1954, the first black boycott in the city’s history was called. Of the 32,000 African-American students in the public school system, only 34 attended the ceremony, along with one principal. The protest was repeated in 1955 and 1956. The ceremony was soon integrated.
Tomorrow, 1904: The first K&B drugstore opens.