Thomy Lafon: The Free Man of Color Who Became One of the Richest Men in New Orleans

The Free Man of Color Who Became One of the Richest Men in New Orleans

Thomy Lafon was born free in New Orleans in 1810—a fact that meant everything in a city and a country where the vast majority of Black people were enslaved. He was Creole, French-speaking, mixed-race, and he started with almost nothing. When he died in 1893, he was one of the wealthiest men in the city, Black or white, and he had given most of it away.

Lafon's early life was a study in hustle and determination. He started by selling cakes to workers—the most modest of enterprises in a city already famous for its food. He opened a small store. He taught school. Nothing about his early career suggested that he would become one of the great financiers of nineteenth-century New Orleans. But Lafon had a gift for money—specifically, for money lending and real estate investment—and in a city where real estate was the path to wealth, that gift would make him rich.

Over the decades, Lafon accumulated an enormous fortune through shrewd lending and strategic property investments. He understood the New Orleans real estate market with an intimacy that came from being born and raised in the city, and he played it masterfully. In an era when free people of color faced legal restrictions and social barriers at every turn, Lafon built wealth through pure financial acumen.

But what made Lafon remarkable wasn't the money—it was what he did with it. He was a philanthropist on a scale that put many of the city's white elites to shame. He donated to institutions serving both Black and white communities: the Institute Catholique, orphan associations, Straight University (a historically Black institution), and the Sisters of the Holy Family, the religious order founded by Henriette DeLille. His giving was ecumenical in the truest sense—he gave to anyone who needed it, regardless of race.

Lafon was also an opponent of slavery and a champion of racial integration in schools, positions that were radical for any person in the antebellum and postbellum South, and doubly so for a man of color. He used his wealth and his social position to advocate for causes that wouldn't become mainstream for another century.

In his will, Lafon continued giving—to local charities, to Charity Hospital, to a nursing home that bore his name. The Thomy Lafon School became known as the best Black schoolhouse in Louisiana, a testament to his belief in education as the path to liberation. That the school was later burned down by a white mob during the Robert Charles riots of 1900 tells you everything about the world Lafon was trying to change.

Lafon never married. He is buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, resting among the Creole aristocracy of the city he helped shape. His story is one of the great untold narratives of New Orleans—a free man of color who built an empire through intelligence and discipline, gave it away with extraordinary generosity, and fought for a vision of equality that his city and his country weren't yet ready to embrace.