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LSU is naming the African American Cultural Center after the university’s first black board chairman.

The Board of Supervisors voted Friday, without objection, to name the center after the late Clarence L. Barney Jr., of New Orleans and who had served as chairman in 1992. It is the second building on the LSU campus to be named after a person of color. (The other is an academic building named after A. P. Tureaud, the civil rights lawyer who initiated the lawsuits that forced the Orleans Parish School System to desegregate.)

Barney, who died in 2005 at the age of 70, had been president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans for more than 30 years, retiring in 1996.

Barney also had served on the boards of the Louisiana Superdome Commission and Dryades Savings Bank. He was a graduate of Southern University. He received a master’s degree from Tulane University and did post-graduate study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School. He lectured nationally on social problems and the inner city economic development process.

“He was an important figure in building bridges between the black and white communities in New Orleans in the 1960s and 1970s,” said National Urban League President Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans.

Barney had pushed to create a center for black students in 1970s. It was called the Harambee House, which closed a few years later.

“We learn from Mr. Barney ‘hope’ that what we are doing as a board matters,” said Board member James M. Williams, a New Orleans lawyer. “We can look to Mr. Barney’s example and realize that we have hope that what we do will matter, that small things we do today will have a lasting impact on the university in the future.”

Williams recalled that as an LSU student in March 1991 he and other African American students sought a place to talk about Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers. But there was no place for them to gather safely on campus.

University administrators resisted efforts to open a center.

Barney brought the chancellor and vice chancellor to a meeting with the students and told the officials that their blocking of the request “ends right now. This center will open,” Williams remembered.

The entire renovation and furnishings for the center cost less than $20,000 in 1992, when LSU had about 300 African American students.

LSU President F. King Alexander reported the fall semester had more African American students enrolled than at any other time in the institution’s history. The university counted just over 3,741 African American students out of about 32,000 total enrollment.

Dereck J. Rovaris, vice provost for diversity, added that LSU now has more black students than about 70 historically black colleges and universities across the country.

Shawn Barney said his father felt LSU provided people in opportunities to improve their lives. He felt “LSU is the most important institution in the state of Louisiana.”

The Clarence L. Barney, Jr. African American Cultural Center is on LSU’s Baton Rouge campus at 3 Raphael Semmes Road. The street is named after the Confederate rear admiral who sailed the CSS Alabama, which raided Union commerce vessels around the world during the Civil War. Shawn Barney said the street name “reflects where they were then. This (the cultural center) reflects where they are now.”

The university plans to hold a rededication ceremony for the Clarence L. Barney Jr. African American Cultural Center during the fall.

Source: Advocate

On Tuesday, April 14, 2015, at 12:00 pm, A.P. Tureaud Jr. will visit LSU campus’s Hill Memorial Library to talk about LSU, Louisiana, and the Civil Rights Movement. His visit is to speak to a group of students studying the Civil Rights movement with Dr. Herman O. Kelly, Jr., and his message can be heard by anyone who wishes to attend. The event is sponsored by the African and African American Studies Program at LSU, and LSU Libraries Special Collections.

This event will take place in the Hill Memorial Library and is free and open to the public. Attendees are encouraged to bring their lunch. Cookies and drinks will be provided. LSU Libraries Special Collections holds the records of LSU, as well as the oral histories from the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, part of LSU Libraries collections. An oral history of A.P. Tureaud from 1993 is part of those collections and is accessible online both in audio format and in transcript in the Louisiana Digital Library at here.

A.P. Tureaud, Jr.’s relationship with the LSU campus is a complicated one. In May of 2011, Tureaud was awarded an honorary doctorate from LSU. His early experiences were quite different. After graduating from J. S. Clark High in New Orleans, he sued LSU and was the first person of color to attend the undergraduate school in 1953. Due to a legal technicality, he was forced to withdraw from LSU.  His dismissal was appealed by his father, civil rights attorney, A. P. Tureaud, Sr. and the U. S. Supreme Court allowed him to return until his case was decided by a three judge court. Due to extreme prejudice and isolation experienced by A.P. Jr., he refused to return and entered Xavier University in New Orleans, from which he graduated in 1957. The following spring he received a master’s degree from Columbia University in rehabilitation counseling.

For ten years he taught in public schools in New Orleans, Washington, DC and White Plains, NY. For the next twenty-six years he was the director of special education in the White Plains School, retiring in 1996. In addition to adjunct teaching at Hunter College, College of New Rochelle and Pace University, Tureaud received a sabbatical grant to study special education programs in Africa and Europe.

He is currently a freelance educational consultant, artist, public speaker and author.  His book, co- authored with Dr. Rachel Emanuel, A More Noble Cause, published by the LSU Press in 2011, chronicles the civil rights struggle in Louisiana.

For more information, please contact Jessica Lacher-Feldman at jlacherfeldman@lsu.edu or at 225.578-6551 or Herman O. Kelly, Jr., at hkelly1@lsu.edu and 225-936-6278.

BATON ROUGE – LSU alumnus Adren O. Wilson was named Public Allies’ fourth national CEO on Thursday, Sept. 4, a position that will support the nonprofit’s mission to advance new leadership communities, nonprofits and civic participation.

Wilson – a native of rural Louisiana – has held several leadership positions as an organizer, advocate, administrator and reformer working to lift individuals, families and communities out of poverty.

“I understand the importance of the American dream, the hope it affords every citizen, and the critical need for leadership and advocacy to make its promise a reality for all,” he said. “I am honored and excited to lead Public Allies in its mission of preparing a new generation of leaders for social change.”

Most recently, Wilson led workforce development and community college retention efforts as Gulf Coast regional director for Single Stop USA. In addition, he has developed transformational leaders for public schools as executive director of New Leaders Greater New Orleans; worked to end persistent poverty in the South by leading the Equity and Inclusion Campaign; and trained thousands of young leaders to advocate for and serve the needs of vulnerable youth as national director of youth and student leadership at The Children’s Defense Fund.

From 2004-08, Wilson served both Democratic and Republican governors as assistant secretary with the Louisiana Department of Social Services, where he led the Office of Family Support, which employed 3,000 people in providing services to families in need, including in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He also served as executive director of the Louisiana Children’s Cabinet and initiated policy reforms such as the passage of the first state-level Earned Income Tax Credit in the South.

Wilson has Bachelor of Arts degrees in history and political science from LSU. He also holds a Master in Public Administration degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a doctorate in public policy from the Nelson Mandela School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Southern University.

Public Allies’ mission is to advance new leaders to strengthen communities, nonprofits and civic participation. Its signature AmeriCorps program recruits diverse young adults with a passion to make a difference and provides them paid, full-time, nonprofit apprenticeships and rigorous leadership development to turn that passion into a career working for community and social change. Since 1992, more than 5,600 Allies have completed the program, and more than 85 percent have continued careers in the nonprofit and public sectors. Public Allies is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis. and operates in 23 communities across the country. Wilson will be based in Public Allies’ Washington, D.C. office.

For more information about Public Allies, visit www.publicallies.org/.

Lettsworth, Louisiana, in Point Coupee Parish, has a population of less than half of the undergraduates currently enrolled in the LSU College of Music & Dramatic Arts. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Kennedy Center Honoree, and six-time Grammy winner George “Buddy” Guy is a Lettsworth native whose hands have made him one of the most influential blues guitarists of all time. For a brief period, those hands helped to repair things that were broken at LSU.

At 19, Guy took a job with what eventually became known as the LSU Office of Facility Services; at the time he could not have enrolled at the university due to his race. Guy worked here from 1955 to 1957, the outset of the Black Civil Rights Movement under Jim Crow laws.

In 1953, two years prior to Guy working on campus, and one year before the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education decision, A. P. Tureaud, Jr. was admitted to LSU, under court order, as our first African American undergraduate.

“It was the beginning of the worst experience I ever had,” recalls Tureaud. “I was totally rejected by the adults, the faculty, and the students.”
Tureaud remembers being harassed, ostracized, and kept awake all night with loud music and repeated banging on his dorm walls. He says this prevented him from studying and, at times, even sleeping. He resigned in less than a semester to pursue his education in more welcoming environs. It would be 11 years before another African American would be called an LSU undergraduate.

Even with all of the acrimony during this period on campus, Buddy Guy graciously recalls working for LSU. Of quitting the maintenance team to follow his dreams of playing guitar in Chicago, a burgeoning blues hub, Guy quotes his foreman as saying, “You can always have your job back, Buddy, if things don’t work out up there.”

But, “work out” things did as Guy quickly established himself as one of Chicago’s greatest bluesmen and a hero to multiple generations of guitarists from Eric Clapton, who inducted him into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005 along with B.B. King, to Keith Richards to John Mayer. Seven years later, in December 2012, he was inducted into the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts along with David Letterman, Dustin Hoffman, and Led Zepplin.

At the induction ceremony, Kennedy Center Chairman David Rubenstein remarked of the bluesman, “Buddy Guy is a titan of the blues and has been a tremendous influence on virtually everyone who has picked up an electric guitar in the last half century.”
Though he hasn’t worked on campus for more than 50 years, LSU, through the College of Music & Dramatic Arts, is proudly bestowing an honorary doctorate to one of our own, George “Buddy” Guy, a true Louisiana musical legend.

As Renee Boutte Myer accepted her homecoming crown, she smiled and waved to a silent audience who stared back at her with dropped jaws.

Myer stepped into civil rights history in a pair of high heels when she became the University’s first African-American homecoming queen.

What separates Myer’s experience from other famous civil rights examples is that it did not happen in the distant past. She was crowned in 1991 – only 22 years ago, the same year many 2014 graduating seniors were born.

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