Leading the Charge

Leontine Goins Luke was an early leader of the civil rights movement in New Orleans. As a community leader and longtime president of the Ninth Ward Civic and Improvement League, she worked tirelessly to educate and register African American voters. Luke was trained in nonviolent resistance at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and—as a member of the executive board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—she played a key role in the integration of the Orleans Parish public school system.

She began her work to confront the unjust conditions in segregated school facilities as a leader in the parent-teacher associations of several elementary, junior high, and high schools. In conjunction with the NAACP, she identified and persuaded families to act as plaintiffs in the 1952 desegregation case Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board.

In 1954 she helped organize the citywide boycott of McDonogh Day ceremonies by African American teachers and students. An annual event during which schoolchildren would place flowers at the Lafayette Square monument honoring John McDonogh—a wealthy New Orleanian who left a large portion of his fortune to the New Orleans public school system upon his death in 1850—McDonogh Day was racially segregated, with separate ceremonies for white and black students. After subsequent boycotts in 1955 and 1956, the ceremony was integrated.  

Following the November 1960 integration of the New Orleans public schools, Luke worked as a community liaison providing support to the families of the four girls who integrated McDonogh No. 19 and William Frantz Elementary, attempting to alleviate some of the economic consequences they faced by providing them with food and clothing. An advocate for children’s rights, she served on the board of the Children’s Bureau as secretary and vice president. 

Oretha Castle Haley was a vital leader of the civil rights movement in New Orleans—challenging segregated facilities and promoting voter registration in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, all while facing arrest and physical violence. Her civil rights activism began while she was a student at Southern University at New Orleans. During that time, she participated in a boycott and protests organized by the Consumers’ League of Greater New Orleans in response to the racially discriminatory employment practices of Dryades Street merchants.

In 1960 she became a founding member of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and served as president of the chapter from 1961 through 1964. Throughout the early 1960s, she actively participated in sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations around the city. Her arrest, along with that of three other activists, for participation in a 1960 sit-in at a Canal Street lunch counter, was the basis of a case, Lombard v. Louisiana, that reached the US Supreme Court in 1963. The court overturned the arrests, in a major victory for the civil rights movement.

In 1964 Haley served as a CORE field secretary in Monroe, Louisiana, where, despite the threat of violence, she worked to register African American voters in rural communities. That year she also helped organize the court case that desegregated Charity Hospital in New Orleans, for which her grandmother Callie Castle served as a plaintiff.

In the 1980s, Haley served as an administrator at Charity Hospital, organized the New Orleans Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, and worked on the political campaigns of African American politicians, including Dorothy Mae Taylor. In 1989 the commercial district of Dryades Street between Philip and Calliope Streets was renamed Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard.

A civil rights activist who dedicated her life to social service, Doris Jean Castle was the younger sister of the civil rights icon Oretha Castle Haley. As a teenager, Castle joined in a boycott and protests organized by the Consumers’ League of Greater New Orleans to fight the racially discriminatory employment practices of Dryades Street merchants. An early member of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), she served as the membership chair of the organization and actively engaged in picketing segregated Canal Street businesses.

Castle courageously participated in the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Rides and was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi. She and her fellow riders refused to pay bail, choosing to serve prison time as a tactic to keep the media’s attention. Castle served some of her time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, which was notorious for its particularly harsh conditions. The following year she participated in CORE’s "Freedom Highways," a campaign challenging segregated facilities along major highways.

During a 1963 protest of the segregated New Orleans City Hall cafeteria, police carried Castle, still in her cafeteria chair, from the building after she refused to leave. She was one of three plaintiffs who successfully sued to desegregate the facility. Working alongside her sister, Castle also helped to desegregate public transportation in New Orleans.

In the mid-1960s she left the city to raise funds for the National Welfare Rights Organization. After she returned to New Orleans in 1967, Castle worked for several social service programs, including some under the auspices of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty initiative. She worked with the Urban League to challenge housing discrimination and served as a counseling specialist with Odyssey House, a behavioral healthcare facility focused on addiction treatment. Later in life she worked as an admissions supervisor at Charity Hospital.

With a journalistic career spanning almost fifty years, Iris Turner Kelso was a trusted voice for political news and an outspoken advocate for civil rights and women’s equality. Kelso was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi. After she graduated from college, she began her career in journalism at the Hattiesburg American, covering small-town news. In 1951 she moved to New Orleans and began working for the New Orleans States, for which she covered City Hall beginning in 1954.

The early 1960s were a pivotal time in Kelso’s life. Three events in particular deeply affected her: the integration of New Orleans public schools, the murder of three civil rights workers in her hometown, and the exclusion of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from the 1964 Democratic National Convention. In 1965 she left journalism to work for Total Community Action (TCA), a local agency created with funds from the federal government’s War on Poverty. When TCA opened a Head Start program in New Orleans in 1965, Kelso was the director. She found this work fulfilling yet challenging and after three years returned to reporting.

In addition to hosting Saturday Politics, a weekly political commentary program on WDSU, she also wrote for Figaro and later the Times-Picayune. In 1969 she won a Peabody award for her investigative reporting series for WDSU, City in Crisis, which documented the city’s financial difficulties. She retired in 1996.

For six decades, Dorothy Mae Taylor worked in public service, focusing on issues of racial equality and women’s rights. Taylor began her career as a social activist in the late 1940s. As the parent-teacher association president for two of the schools her children attended, she led a fight against the Orleans Parish School Board demanding equality within the segregated system and eventually won supplies and funding for black schools on par with those for white children. Her participation in the civil rights movement continued with her successful efforts to desegregate the facilities of the New Orleans Recreation Department and to register African American voters.

A trailblazer, Taylor became the first African American woman elected to the Louisiana State Legislature, in 1971; the first woman to receive the Legislator of the Year award, in 1972; the first African American woman to head a state department (Urban and Community Affairs), in 1984; and one of the first two women (along with Peggy Wilson)—and the first African American woman—to serve on the New Orleans City Council, in 1986. As a council member, Taylor braved torrents of criticism in 1992 after presenting an ordinance banning discrimination in the membership of Mardi Gras krewes, a move that paved the way for their desegregation. 

Marie Corinne Claiborne “Lindy” Boggs began her political career in the 1930s and 1940s as a founding member of the Independent Women’s Organization, volunteering with the group during the Sam Jones and deLesseps “Chep” Morrison campaigns. When her husband, Hale Boggs, was elected to the US House of Representatives, Lindy became an active congressional spouse—running his campaigns, managing his Capitol office, and serving as president of the Democratic Wives’ Forum and the Woman’s National Democratic Club.

Following the death of her husband, Lindy was elected to fill his congressional seat, in 1973, making her the first woman from Louisiana elected to Congress. Three years later, she became the first woman to chair a national party convention. During her eighteen years in office, Boggs consistently championed equal rights for women and minorities. Her popularity within the African American community helped her win reelection an astonishing eight times in a majority African American district. She retired from Congress—choosing not to seek another term—in 1991.