During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the University Section in Uptown New Orleans was home to five colleges and universities – Tulane University, Loyola, St. Mary’s Dominican College, Newcomb College and, as seen in this circa 1910 photograph, Leland University. Remaining today are Tulane and Loyola. Dominican closed in 1984 and Newcomb merged with Tulane. Leland, located on St. Charles Avenue roughly between today’s Audubon Street and Audubon Place, closed its 10-acre New Orleans campus in 1915 before moving in 1923 to Baker, north of Baton Rouge.
Founded in 1870 by Brooklyn philanthropist Holbrook Chamberlain and the New York-based American Baptist Home Mission Society, Leland was one of four colleges created in New Orleans during Reconstruction to help educate and enhance the lives of Black Americans. Chamberlain named the university Leland for his father-in-law, the famed Massachusetts Baptist minister and abolitionist John Leland. The other three colleges were Southern University (1880), Straight University (1868), and New Orleans University (1873). In 1934 Straight and New Orleans University merged to form Dillard University.
According to various histories and articles written about Leland, classes were initially held in the basement of Tulane Avenue Baptist Church before moving to its 10-acre uptown site. It included two main buildings – Chamberlain Hall and University Hall seen here. The school was co-ed and open to all races, though most early professors and administrators were white. Its mission was to create Black teachers, ministers and to prepare others for the trades. And like most 19th century universities, Leland’s ambitious classical curricula included Latin, Greek, mathematics, rhetoric, languages, philosophy, history and literature. By the turn of the century, Leland’s total enrollment had reached 700 students. In a 1903 essay titled “The Talented Tenth,” W.E.B. DuBois, civil rights advocate and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, described Leland as one of the six leading African-American colleges in the nation.
Despite its initial success, enrollment slowly declined. Then came the hurricane of 1915 that badly damaged the buildings, forcing the campus to close. In addition, that section of St. Charles Avenue near Audubon Park, the site of the 1884-1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, had become prime real estate for developers. With mounting economic and social pressures, Leland’s board decided to relocate the campus to another part of the state. School officials first tried Alexandria, where they reportedly met some resistance from locals. They eventually decided upon a 200-plus-acre site in Baker, where it operated from 1923 until it closed permanently in 1960. Its graduates included Grambling University’s famed football coach Eddie Robinson.
As a historical side note, the photograph seen here was taken by Arthur P. Bedou (1882-1960), a prominent and award-winning New Orleans photographer in the city’s Black community. He documented, among many other events, Black family life, sporting and social events, and visiting dignitaries such as Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Andrew Carnegie. He also published postcards bearing his photographs, such as the one here of Leland University. His photographs are now in the collection of Xavier University in New Orleans.