Loyola University New Orleans Special Collections & Archives

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  Exhibit

  Leading Toward Justice: Loyola, New Orleans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights

  Leading Toward Justice: Loyola, New Orleans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights delves into Loyola's past to examine the role of faith leaders in the Civil Rights Movement and the lasting legacy of their actions on our campus.

  Presented in conjunction with The Trail They Blazed, from the Historic New Orleans Collection, Leading Toward Justice situates Loyola’s story within the wider struggle for voting rights and desegregation in New Orleans. Together, both exhibits explore how local action contributed to the movement for racial justice.

  Leading Toward Justice explores the work of Rev. Louis J. Twomey, S.J., and Rev. Joseph H. Fichter, S.J., whose efforts to desegregate Loyola University New Orleans and other Catholic institutions in the mid-20th century challenged the entrenched racial inequalities of New Orleans and the broader South.

  While Jesuit leaders played visible roles in these efforts, Black perspectives have been discounted or omitted from Loyola’s historical narrative and are largely absent from the archival record. This exhibit confronts that absence by centering the experiences and contributions of Black students and activists whose presence transformed the university. Through curated letters, photographs, and printed materials from our collections, we explore Loyola’s involvement in desegregation, interracial Catholic organizations, the arrival of the first Black students on campus, and the resistance these changes provoked. By amplifying these stories, our exhibit invites reflection on a challenging past and the ongoing work of social justice. 

  We would like to acknowledge R. Bentley Anderson’s Black, White and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956 in the development of this exhibition.

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  Spotlight on Social Justice

  The Spotlight on Social Justice exhibit highlights a selection of materials held within the Special Collections & Archives at Loyola University dedicated to social justice activism in action.

  The items presented here illustrate protest, advocacy, and grassroots activism exemplifying our commitment to preserving collections that document the history of social justice and supporting Loyola’s mission to "work for a more just world."

  Collections utilized in this exhibit:

  The Rosemary Drown Archdiocese of New Orleans and School Integration Collection details the New Orleans Archdiocese's intent to end segregation in parochial schools, and the fierce response from local opposition groups.

  Louis J. Twomey, S.J. Papers documents the post-World War II social reform work of the founding director of Loyola's Institute of Human Relations, Louis J. Twomey, through correspondence, administrative files, photographic materials and audio recordings.

  The New Orleans Social Justice and Activism collection consist of materials related to social justice issues in and around New Orleans and Latin America from the mid-1980s to early 1991. 

  The K Brad Ott Papers consists of materials chronicling the production and distribution of Ott’s self-published social justice and activism publications. The bulk of the collection’s materials chronicle Ott’s publishing history. The remaining contents of the collection consist of other publications, ephemera, and correspondence congregated by Ott during his publishing years.

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  Exhibit

  Chin-Deep in Debris: A Katrina Retrospect One Decade Later

  Scheduled to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Chin-Deep in Debris: A Katrina Retrospect One Decade Later is a multi-media exhibit highlighting Loyola University’s resilient response to the Category 3 storm and the destruction left in its wake.

  Featured within the exhibit are photographs by Harold Baquet and select publications of The Maroon and The Wolf. 

  In addition, a number of interviews of the Hurricane Katrina Oral Histories Collection have been made accessible (available only in the Booth-Bricker Special Collections & Archives Reading Room).
  

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  Media Traditions: Scrapbooking, Memory Archives, and Self-Presentation

  Why do we wish to be remembered, even when none remain who looked upon our face? Surely, though it must retain an element of self-consideration, it is a last acknowledgment that we need to be loved; and having gone from all touch, we trust that memory may, as it were, keep unseen presence within the borders of day.

  --William Soutar, 

  Diaries of a Dying Man, August 13, 1943

  Introduction:

  When one decides to create a memory book, going about the effort to bring together a scrapbook’s assemblage, a journal’s record, a commonplace book’s chosen information, a photo album’s visual documentation, or a diary’s narrative, one is constructing and presenting identity to some imagined current or future audience.

  The social network sites of today offer much the same outlet that memory archiving and scrapbooking once did.  Users create personal media assemblages sharing information, photographs, experiences, artworks, quotes, and beliefs presenting their identity to an audience online.

  As you view this exhibit, we ask you to contemplate the connections between the memory archives of the past and the contemporary modes of self-presentation we use today.  Drawing correlations between picture-heavy travel abroad scrapbook from 1963 and a present-day Instagram account, or between a collection of friends’ autographs from 1879 and a string of birthday wishes on a Facebook wall.  In this mode, the viewer can explore both how and why we collectively “wish to be remembered” through our ever-evolving media traditions.

View All Exhibits (6)