By Scott Dyer
BATON ROUGE, La.
For decades three historically Black colleges and universities have called New Orleans home.
- Southern University-New Orleans (SUNO), founded in 1956 as a branch of a system known for producing a majority of the state’s Black lawyers.
- Xavier University of Louisiana, founded in 1915 and long known for sending the most African-American students to medical school of any in the United States.
- And Dillard University, founded in 1869, ranked just five weeks ago as one of the best liberal arts schools in the South by U.S. News and World Report.
Now the schools stand empty — their students, faculty and staff scattered to the four winds as Category 4 Hurricane Katrina blew off rooftops, uprooted trees, damaged lecture halls and classrooms and disrupted lives.
The SUNO campus is likely a complete loss due to Hurricane Katrina, says Dr. Edward R. Jackson, the acting president of the Southern University System.
The school — located just blocks from both Lake Pontchartrain and the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal — was flooded by up to 15 feet of water, says Jackson, who also serves as chancellor of Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge.
A week after the storm, there was still 7 to 8 feet of water in places, and Jackson says there is a good chance that the school’s physical plant is a total loss.
Although Jackson is hopeful that Southern’s New Orleans campus will eventually be rebuilt, he notes that in the meantime, about 3,200 SUNO students are without a school.
“About 99 percent of the students attending SUNO were from the New Orleans area, and many of them have lost their homes and everything they own — it’s truly devastating,” he says, adding that he fears some SUNO faculty and students may even have lost their lives.
Flooding was not as catastrophic at Dillard, a stately, tree-lined campus located in Gentilly, near City Park, or at Xavier, an urban campus in Midtown, near the Mississippi River and the Superdome. But drive-by surveys by the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune conducted as floodwaters receded revealed significant tree loss at Dillard and at least a few feet of flooding on the ground floors of both campuses.
