Charlie Duthu remembers his school days fondly despite the racially segregated arrangement enforced in Terrebonne Parish and across the South.
Duthu, a 73-year-old United Houma Nation tribal member, attended Daigleville School while the parish operated a public school system that segregated campuses three ways: all white, all Black, all Native American.
“I’m glad that the School Board allowed us to have our own school, said Duthu, who graduated from the Houma school in 1966. There was a stigma back then against us.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, but Terrebonne still divided students according to their skin color.
United Houma Nation celebrates new tribal office with blessing ceremony
The United Houma Nation held a blessing ceremony Friday for its new tribal office and plans to host a larger public gathering once its museum area is ready this summer.
The tribe has consolidated from rented office space on Grand Caillou Road in Houma and the former Native American school building in Golden Meadow into this new space. The tribe owns the Golden Meadow building and will convert it to space for exhibits and meetings after the move to the new offices in Houma.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the tribe was not able to have a large public opening but plans to host a larger gathering in late June or early July.
“It’s the flu to the 12th power,” remarked Ivory Payne, a Baton Rouge publisher who is urging Black Louisianans to get COVID-19 vaccines.
“I couldn’t breathe,” Payne said, describing his own experience with the virus in early February. “I think the shortness of breath was the worst thing. It was a terrible experience.”
After his doctors told him to go home and quarantine for 14 days, Payne, 60, found that his fight against the respiratory illness had just begun. He said that after a difficult two weeks in isolation, his condition only got worse.
Payne described a litany of troubling COVID-19 symptoms, including not being able to smell or taste, body aches that prevented him from lifting everyday items and nausea. He spent three distressed weeks in the hospital, where he was forced to consider his chances of survival.
A federal judge in New Orleans has scheduled a hearing for May 3 on a lawsuit filed by the United Houma Nation contesting the sale of a historic school building in Houma.
The tribe filed the lawsuit in February against the Terrebonne Parish School Board. The tribe claims the board sold the Daigleville School for half its appraised value without notifying the tribe.
The board sold the school property to Walter Guidry of Montegut for $115,000, according to the suit.
The school, at 8542 E. Main St. in Houma, was jointly run by the United Houma Nation and the School Board under an agreement signed in May 2015, the lawsuit says.
BATON ROUGE Fewer than two weeks after officials hailed the opening of a federal mass vaccination site in Louisiana s capital city, Gov. John Bel Edwards said that the location isn t seeing enough traffic from people seeking the thousands of coronavirus vaccine doses available. Demand at that site is not what we need it to be, not what we hoped it would be, the Democratic governor said.
The acknowledgment of problems at the Baton Rouge vaccination site was the latest sign that Louisiana residents interest in the vaccine is subsiding, with only one-quarter of the state fully immunized from the COVID-19 disease caused by the coronavirus.