Founder of Alexandria’s Peabody High School shaped course of Black education in state

Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part series. 

In honor of Black History Month, local historian and author Micheal Wynne spoke to the City of Alexandria Rotary Club about four Black local historical figures who were instrumental in building and shaping Alexandria and Pineville. The four he spoke about were August J. Toussaint, Charles Frederick Page, John Baptiste LaFargue and Louis Berry. 

Black history, Wynne told the Rotarians, is everyone’s history. 

“I got interested in our area’s African-American history when I began actively researching local history a couple decades ago,” Wynne said in an email. “I found almost nothing written in all of our local history books or on display in local historical museums about African-American history in Central Louisiana. It was like their history was purposely left out. This shocked me as at least 1/3 of our population is African American.” 

John Baptiste LaFargue 

“He is universally considered the father of Black education in Louisiana,” said Wynne, who is working on a biography of John Baptiste LaFargue. “Quite frankly, I think he is the father of education in Louisiana.” 

LaFargue was the son of a white Confederate plantation owner and female slave, Wynne said. When he was 3, he was taken away from his mother and raised by his paternal grandmother. They moved in with the Avoyelles Parish Judge Henry Clay Edwards, who taught law to LaFargue, who was still a child. 

As a teenager, he rode a horse from Marksville to Alexandria to deliver mail and became the first delivery boy for The Town Talk for out-of-town subscribers. 

He was the first trained Black teacher hired in Avoyelles in the early 1880s, Wynne said. 

“He moved to Alexandria in the mid-1880s. He organized the Negro Civic League which was basically the equivalent of the Rotary Club here,” Wynne said.  

In 1895, with the league’s help, he created what would become Peabody High School, now known as Peabody Magnet High School. 

“This would be the first $100,000 school building for Black children in the state of Louisiana,” Wynne said. “The name of Peabody came from philanthropist George Peabody who contribute some funding for Peabody after LaFargue traveled to Washington, D.C., to contact him.” 

The school was originally called Peabody Normal and Industrial School. LaFargue’s wife, Sarah, became the first principal of Peabody and the first Black female principal in Louisiana. 

LaFargue also founded the Colored State Teacher’s Association that existed until the 1960s when it merged with the white state teachers association, Wynne said.  

“He founded the first two Black newspapers in the state of Louisiana,” he said. 

LaFargue’s life and legacy will be part of an upcoming film project by filmmakers Ken Burns and Erika Dilday. It will tell the history of Black Americans from the Emancipation to Reconstruction to the Great Migration. The three- or four-part documentary series “Emancipation to Exodus” is set to air on PBS in 2027.   

“LaFargue clearly is the greatest educator, of any race, in Louisiana. Nobody that I am aware of has done more,” Wynne stated in an email. 

Wynne said he especially enjoys “doing research on African-American subjects as I am breaking new ground every day in this area. And what I have found so far is absolutely fascinating. But there is still so much more to research.” 

“There is a great need to preserve African American history, more than ever. So much has been lost due to neglect as well as willful destruction by haters. It is all of our jobs, our responsibility to save all of our history, not just of our own race or gender or creed,” Wynne stated in his email. “If we ourselves want and hope for respect, we must offer respect to others of different origins. Much of our history is not only lost due to neglect, but even worse due to ignorance.  History of different levels of importance happens every day. As has been said many times, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’  (from George Santayanna)”