In search of history

When Lori L. Martin first made the move to Baton Rouge from upstate New York in 2013, she got the same question, over and over: Why? Why leave New York behind for Louisiana?

The truest answer wasn’t the food, the culture, the warmer climate—it was Baton Rouge’s civil rights history. Many Baton Rouge schools don’t cover our civil rights record in courses on state and local history, Martin says, but it’s very much present, from the historic plantations to the trailblazing 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott to the Black Lives Matter protests of today.

Now an associate professor of sociology and African and African-American studies at LSU, Martin teaches that history to her students daily. She’s even recently published an installment of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series on South Baton Rouge. Last year, she secured recognition from the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench by the Road Project to erect a bench in honor of the bus boycott. You can find the bench at the site of Baton Rouge’s first high school for black students, the McKinley High School Alumni Center on Thomas H. Delpit Drive. It serves as a sign that our city’s civil rights past won’t be easily forgotten.

Martin believes the key to preserving our history is getting these stories into school curricula for the next generation—and for the rest of us to seek out the resources available around this city to school ourselves.

“The library has really good information that’s available online. Some of the local branches have more information about civil rights history than others. The Carver Library [on Terrace Avenue], for example, often has really great exhibits and resources—literally, as you walk in, you see giant images from the civil rights movement in Baton Rouge. Scotlandville Branch Library also has an extensive collection of resources related to that.

At places like LSU, there’s the African and African-American Studies program that puts on events not only for students but also the general public. And then of course, the entire curriculum focuses around issues of race relations in general but also, in some cases, local history as well.

I recently published a book with Pastor Raymond Jetson on South Baton Rouge, and I did a number of talks on campus. So, there are opportunities for people to learn about civil rights history at LSU, there are opportunities at local libraries and then there are also community centers in South Baton Rouge and other places around the parish that people can visit.” – Lori L. Martin

Read more from our cover story, featuring people standing up to solve racial issues in Baton Rouge.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.