Should a Black woman's dreams for New Orleans youth be sacrificed to pay debts owed by the Archdiocese of New Orleans related to the decades-long sex abuse scandal?
At her death in 1837, Marie Couvent entrusted land in the Marigny neighborhood to be used to provide free education to children of African descent. Until 2017, the Roman Catholic Church upheld the spirit of this inheritance. Educational and youth-oriented nonprofits functioned at the site for most of the 180 years after Couvent's death.
Since 2019, the archdiocese has attempted to set aside Couvent's educational ideals and sell the Couvent School site to cover part of the payments owed to victims of sexual abuse enabled by the church.
These payments are, of course, urgently needed to partially address the needs of victims in these cases. Recent legal proceedings have focused on the archdiocesan ownership of the site, not on the clear statement in the will about the intended permanent use of the property.
Misusing the unique inheritance of an African woman in this way is simply wrong.
The site -- 1941 Dauphine St. -- has long served as a significant site of Black Catholic education. Opening in 1848, L'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was created at a time when New Orleans' public schools only served White children and it was illegal to teach enslaved children.
Both the land and the idea for the school originated with Marie Couvent, who was born in West Africa, enslaved as a child in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and moved to New Orleans as a free woman after the Haitian Revolution.
The original school was connected to the church, but free people of color and their Creole descendants administered it until 1915. The school gradually came under the control of the church, but it continued to primarily serve Black children.
The remarkable endurance of the site as a school is a testament to the vision of a formerly enslaved woman who could not sign her own name and the tireless efforts of generations of Black New Orleanians determined to provide their children with an education.
Some in New Orleans will recall that a public school named for Couvent (unrelated to the Marigny site) was renamed in the 1990s based on the fact that Couvent herself held a number of other African-Americans as slaves. The history of African-American slave ownership and the history of relationships between free and enslaved people in the Couvent household are complex subjects and raise difficult questions.
What is unambiguous is the specific intention of the Couvent will which entrusted the property on Dauphine Street to Roman Catholic leadership in New Orleans: " ... my land at the corner of Grands Hommes and Union streets will be forever dedicated and employed for the establishment of a free school for the orphans of color of the Faubourg Marigny ... I intend that the said land and buildings will never be sold under any pretext whatsoever[.]"
As demographics and circumstances changed in the Marigny neighborhood and in New Orleans between the mid-1800s and the early 2000s, the Roman Catholic Church sought to follow this directive by keeping the site focused on serving Black youth.
Commercial sale and noneducational use of the property would clearly betray Couvent's trust and add a new violation to the long history of slavery, racism and inequity in this city.
Putting a plaque on the site acknowledging the Couvent inheritance, while important, will not redress this breach of trust and misuse of the property.
The archdiocese should reverse its current course and return to its former position of good faith; and any commercial buyer should refuse to join in a proposed betrayal of the dying directive of a formerly enslaved Black woman who asked that her land be used forever to educate disadvantaged children in this city.