The Dew Drop Inn Hotel & Lounge, after a 54-year pause, is hosting live music once again. The legendary Central City nightclub reopened Friday (March 1) with performances that paid homage to its storied history. The Dew Drop on the LaSalle Street was the city’s leading Black music venue during rock ‘n’ roll’s formative years. […]
schools
Amid national furor over monuments, white-supremacist namesake of Lusher school draws new scrutiny
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In 1961 — only a year after Ruby Bridges had famously integrated New Orleans’ public schools — Sylvia Branch became the first black child to attend Robert Mills Lusher school, and still today recounts how the Lusher administration welcomed her with literally open arms.
Branch’s admission, however, would have been anathema to the school’s namesake, Robert Mills Lusher, who followed a Confederate governmental career with leadership of the state’s public schools, and used that post to promote “the supremacy of the Caucasian race,” in his words. For more than three decades from the end of the Civil War until the end of the 19th Century, Lusher fought in word and deed for the idea that the purpose of the public schools was to ensure that white students remained in a better social position than blacks.
Now — as Nazi and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers march nationally in support of Confederate monuments, while activist groups in New Orleans demand the removal of memorials to white supremacists, and children and adults alike struggle to make sense of it all — celebrated local historian and author Michael Tisserand has released the results of his research into Robert Mills Lusher’s racist legacy.
