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.