A.P. Tureaud: The Lawyer Who Desegregated New Orleans

The Lawyer Who Desegregated New Orleans

Before Ruby Bridges walked through those doors at William Frantz Elementary School in 1960, somebody had to file the lawsuit. That somebody was Alexander Pierre Tureaud, and he'd been fighting that fight for decades before the cameras showed up.

Born in 1899 in New Orleans, Tureaud grew up in the Seventh Ward, the heart of the city's Creole community. He graduated from Howard University's law school and returned home to a city where Black lawyers could barely find office space, let alone justice. He set up shop in the Peter Claver Building, which doubled as the local NAACP headquarters, and got to work.

For more than three decades, Tureaud served as the lead attorney for the New Orleans NAACP chapter, systematically dismantling Jim Crow one lawsuit at a time. Working alongside Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Tureaud filed the lawsuits that desegregated New Orleans' public schools — the first elementary schools integrated in the Deep South.

In 1953, he made it personal. Tureaud sued the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors to desegregate the university, and he did it on behalf of his own son. A.P. Tureaud Jr. became LSU's first Black student. That takes a particular kind of courage — not just filing a lawsuit against the most powerful institution in the state, but putting your own child on the front line of history.

Tureaud's cases touched every corner of segregated life in New Orleans: schools, universities, public facilities, voting rights. He was the legal backbone of the civil rights movement in Louisiana, the man who turned moral arguments into court orders.

He died in 1972, having lived long enough to see the world he'd fought for start to take shape. Today, a statue stands at the beginning of A.P. Tureaud Avenue in the Seventh Ward — the neighborhood where he was born, in the city he changed forever.