The Legacies They Built: Honoring Pinkie Gordon Lane, Lutrill & Pearl Payne, and Julian T. White.”: Main Library Resources

Throughout the decades-long legal battle to end segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement, attorney Alexander Pierre Tureaud was one of the most influential figures in Louisiana's courts. A More Noble Cause presents both the powerful story of one man's lifelong battle for racial justice and the very personal biography of a black professional and his family in the Jim Crow--era Louisiana. During a career that spanned more than forty years, A. P. Tureaud was at times the only regularly practicing black attorney in Louisiana. From his base in New Orleans, the civil rights pioneer fought successfully to obtain equal pay for Louisiana's black teachers, to desegregate public accommodations, schools, and buses, and for voting rights of qualified black residents. Tureaud's work, along with that of dozens of other African American lawyers, formed part of a larger legal battle that eventually overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized racial segregation. This intimate account, based on more than twenty years of research into the attorney's astounding legal and civil rights career as well as his community work, offers the first full-length study of Tureaud.

The author provides a detailed account of his journey from a small racially segregated town in north Louisiana to a large predominately white university, where he became engaged in the racial desegregation movement, during his 36-year tenure as a professor. Based on personal observations, experiences, documents, and reports, the book reveals how desegregation policies, programs, and events, and the actions of African American students, faculty, and staff, shaped the course of desegregation, cultural diversity, race relations, and cultural transformation of the university. This book fills a gap in the history of desegregation of a historically white public university that has not, heretofore, been revealed. - Joyce Marie Jackson, Ph.D. Director, African & African American Studies - Professor, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University