Where Tulane University currently sits on St. Charles Avenue once was a university that W.E.B. Dubois described as one of the six largest and most important schools educating Black people.
Founded in 1870, Leland University started in the basement of Tulane Avenue Baptist Church. Holbrook Chamberlain, a merchant from Brooklyn, N.Y., helped the Baptist Free Mission Society establish the institution. It eventually moved to a large property across from Audubon Park.
“This school is beautifully situated on St. Charles Avenue,” African American High Schools in Louisiana Before 1970 states. “It comprises two large brick buildings and about 10 acres of very valuable land.”
Primarily designed with former enslaved people in mind, Leland prepared them for the ministry, to teach in Black classrooms and to become mechanics. “Leland was open to students of all races,” Lost Colleges states. “Initially, the administration and faculty were largely white.”
According to New Orleans Historical, Leland offered numerous courses, including art, sciences, philosophy, theology, agricultural studies, domestic sciences, industrial education, Greek and Latin.
“Each student was required to spend at least one hour of the day in the industrial classes,” the Creole Genealogical and Historical Association (CreoleGen) states, “doing work about the campus or helping on the university’s farm.”
With declining enrollment and Tulane buying surrounding property, Leland closed after the campus wasreceived severely damaged during the hurricane of 1915, according to New Orleans Magazine.
“Most people blamed the storm for Leland’s demise, but the trustees had been mulling the move for a while, and the disaster merely occasioned it,” author Richard Campanella wrote in 2015. Interest in the property “gave Leland’s trustees all the more cause to sell while the market was hot.”
In 1923, the institution re-opened as Leland College in Baker. Financial difficulties forced it to close in 1960.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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