Edgar Joseph Edmunds, known almost universally as E. J. Edmunds, was a remarkable product of the unique atmosphere of nineteenth century New Orleans. He was born in the city on January 26, 1851 to Edgard Amroise (or Edgar) and Rose Euphémie Foy Edmunds. Both Edgar and Rose were free persons of color.
E. J.'s family was fortunate because New Orleans was home to one of the largest and most affluent communities of free persons of color. The community was a product of Louisiana's origins as a French colony. A number Frenchmen who immigrated to the city entered into romantic relationships with Black women. Only rarely would couples marry, but such relationships, termed plaçages, were recognized legally and socially. This stood in contrast to other states where romantic, or sexual, relations between white men and Black women, while not uncommon, were largely ignored and unrecognized.
By the time E. J. Edmunds was born, free persons of color made up about about 8,000 (or 7%) of the nearly 120,000 residents of New Orleans. Most were of mixed race and could trace their parentage to plaçages. They spoke French and held skilled jobs such as druggist or carpenter.
E. J.'s parents were part of this community. His father worked in retail. His first jobs were as a clerk and a salesman but he later became director for a dry-goods company. His work brought him into contact with manufacturers in the northeast and Europe, and he even traveled to France. He saw enough financial success that he was able to purchase his own home near Tremé, the neighborhood featured in the TV series of the same name.
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| From The Industries of New Orleans |
A photograph of E. J. shows that he was very light-skinned, so his parents were likely of mixed race. Unfortunately, I can't find any information about E. J.'s paternal grandparents. His father first appears in records when he was in his twenties.
More is known about E. J.'s material grandparents. His grandmother Rose was the product of a plaçage. Her mother was Zelie Aubry, a French-speaking woman of color who had been born in Louisiana. Her father was the French immigrant Prosper Foy. Zelie and Prosper has become romantically involved by 1810, a few years after he moved to New Orleans. Prosper and Rose never married, and Prosper even became romantically involved with other women, but he remained in contact with Zelie and her family and supported them financially.
While E. J. would later became active in efforts to uplift freed people, his family had participated in the practice of enslavement. His grandfather Prosper tried farming, first at a plantation just outside the city and then at one in St. James Parish. Both plantations were maintained with the help of enslaved workers.
The plantations were relatively modest operations. There were eighteen enslaved people on the first plantation, too few to make Prosper a member of Louisiana's planter elite. I have not been able to find any records of what crops Prosper grew, but the main cash crops in the region were rice, sugar, and tobacco. Prosper likely focused on subsidence crops and livestock (growing corn and raising hogs) and tobacco as rice and sugar planting required a larger labor force than was available to him.
The grandmother Zelie did not try her hand at farming, but she used enslaved domestic labor to run her household as did her brother Florville Foy. E. J.'s mother Rose never enslaved anyone, but she grew up in the presence of enslaved workers.
E. J. was only eleven years old when New Orleans was occupied by Union troops during the Civil War, so he had little personal experience with slavery. His formative years were spent as people in the city struggled to readjust to the changes brought about by the Civil War and Emancipation.
Living in New Orleans, E. J. was fortunate to have access to one of the best educational systems in the south. Louisiana was one of the few southern states that had supported public schools during the antebellum. At the start of the Civil War, about ten-thousand students (or one in four free school-age children) were attended public school. The public schools were whites-only, but the city also supported a number of private schools and, unlike other parts of the south, there were no laws prohibiting the private education of Blacks.
At least on paper, schools in Louisiana were integrated after the Civil War. An 1868 clause in a constitutional revision explicitly prohibited racial segregation of public schools. However, many whites persisted in opposing racially integrated schools. Despite such resistance, E. J. and his siblings were able to obtain educations. E. J. attended the Fillmore School. It is unclear when exactly he began attending. He may be a "Master Edmunds" who was one of the students mentioned in a June 1870 newspaper report on public exercises held at the end of the school term. He is explicitly mentioned in a newspaper report published a year later.
During this time, E. J. and his siblings may have been passing as "white," at least on occasion. Both E. J.'s brother Arnold and his sister Olivia attended white-only schools before school integration was passed into law. Olivia attracted negative public attention in 1868 when conservatives newspaper began critically reporting that she and twenty-seven other Black students were attended the Bayou Road Girls School, a school that had always been whites-only. Some students were expelled, but Olivia was allowed to continue to attend after her family claimed she was white and provided a birth certificate as supporting evidence. The birth certificate had been filed in May 1868, and it replaced an older certificate that identified her parents as free persons of color. (The new certificate did not identify the parents' race.) A similar brith certificate was filed for E. J.
E. J.'s attendance at the Fillmore School is anomalous. The school was a grammar school that largely served students considerably younger than him. When he graduated, E. J. was twenty years old, six years older than the average student. Moreover, his later achievements show that he was well-educated and certainly had learned to learn in classes aimed at fourteen-year-olds.
In June 1871, shortly after graduated from the Fillmore School, E. J. made the remarkable decision to travel to Paris, France to take the entrance exam for École Polytechnique. The school is an elite science and engineering school that educated France's technical elite. It offered a two-year program in science and theoretical mathematics. Graduates were then placed into more specialized schools that trained them for professions like the military, civil engineering, and science. Those who attended the school around this time included the distinguished mathematician Henri Poincaré who enrolled in 1873.
E. J.'s decision to apply for admissions to the Polytechnique was a bold one as admissions was highly competitive. Applicants were required to be French citizens, hold the equivalent of a high school diploma, and pass a highly competitive examination. E. J. presumably claimed citizenship though his grandfather and presented his diploma from the Fillmore School. He also passed the admissions exam, although just barely. He was ranked near the bottom of his class: 135th out of the 144 students admitted.
It is unclear how E. J. was able to pass the exam as it tested material that went well-beyond what was taught at the Fillmore School. When E. J. took the exam, it heavily emphasized the mathematics, and included a number of questions on topics such as descriptive and analytic geometry. This went well beyond the curriculum offered at Fillmore which provided rote instruction in basic arithmetic. The test would have been challenging to many America college students, and even students studying in France's superior educational systems often sought additional private tutoring to prepare for the entrance exams. Prior to traveling to France, E. J. must have engaged in significant self-study or tutoring, but unfortunately there are no records of what exactly he did.
At the Polytechnique, E. J. faced considerable challenges. The school's curriculum was difficult for even the best of students, and E. J. had the additional burden of studying in a foreign country, far away from his family and friends. No information is available about how he was received by his classmates. As one of the few (possibly the only) foreign students in his class, he certainly stood out. His mixed-race background was also highly unusual (only one other Black student had studied at the Polytechnique and that had been decades ago), but this may have gone unnoticed as E. J. could easily have passed for white.
Despite these challenges, E. J. succeeded at the school. He was not one of the top students (he remained rank in the bottom quartile of his class), but he passed. On February 10, 1873, he was transferred to the École d'Application de l'Artillerie to receive training as an artillery officer. Completing the school would have positioned E. J. for a successful career in the French military, but he left the school around 1874 without completing a degree. As with much about his education, there is no record of how this impactful decision was made.
By spring 1875, E. J. had returned to the city of New Orleans. It is not entirely clear what he did in the intervening year. He may have spent that time in Germany studying at the University of Strasbourg as he later wrote that he had been educated there. (Strasbourg became part of the Germany Empire in 1871 following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.)
E. J. returned to New Orleans to work in education. Educational opportunities for Blacks had expanded greatly while E. J. had been in Europe. The politically influential Black politician P. B. S. Pinchback had been elected to the school board. A majority of the board was Black, and its members included several of Pinchback's political supporters. The board worked to remake the educational system of New Orleans and improve opportunities for freedmen. E. J. had much to offer them as his studies in France placed him within the ranks of the best education man in the state.
E. J. was first appointed as principal of Sumner School, a newly opened all-Black school. However, he had only served a few months when the school board gave him an appointment that would become more controversial: an appointment as teacher at the Boys Central High School. Boys Central was regarded as the premier public high school in the state. It attracted students from elite private academies.
Boys Central was regarded as a "white school," but racial boundaries had not always been strictly enforced. E. J.'s brother A. J. had not only attended the school, but he even graduated valedictorian in December 1872. However, racial tensions within the had risen in the intervening two years. The conservative press harshly criticized efforts to expand educational opportunities, and matters came to a head in December 1874. On December 14, some Black girls attempted to take the entrance exam for the "white" high school in New Orleans. They were turned away and the students at the school issued a public letter protesting efforts to integrate school. The next day (December 15), students at Boys Central issued a similar letter protesting against efforts to integrate their school. Tensions erupted in violence two days later (on December 17). A number of white youths, including students from the Boys School, traveled around the city, visiting "white" public school and forcibly removing all Black students they found. Members of the Black community, armed with clubs and brickbats, assembled in opposition, and a "general row" broke out nearby one school. The fight left one Black man (Eugene Duclostenge) dead and two police officers (Officers Cheevers and Williams) injured. To avoid further violence, the school superintendent closed the public schools for remainder of the term. Spring and summer passed without major incident, but there was every reason to expect that E. J.'s appointment would cause further disruption.
E. J. was appointed as one of the six teachers at Boys Central on September 11, 1875. On the first day of class, his presence was predictably a source of conflict. The senior students (eleven students in total) left in protest upon leaving of E. J.'s presence. After the school day ended and E. J. left the school, a young man in late teens or early twenties went up to him and "grossly insulted him without any provocation." E. J. responded calmly and simply withdrew from the encounter.
Following the student walkout, conservatives newspapers intensified their criticism of the school board and their decision to appoint Edmunds. While they were successful in provoking public anger, they were unsuccessful in getting E. J. removed. P. B. S. Pinchback and the rest of the school board continued to support him.
The controversy surrounding E. J. had died down by the end of fall. He remained in the position until spring 1877. That was a chaotic time for the entire state. Both political parties claimed to have won the 1876 election, and two different bodies organized as the state legislature until fall when the Republicans conceded defeat. The conservatives Democrats who were swept into power quickly worked to undo the changes brought about the Reconstruction government. For E. J., this meant a decline in his professional fortunes.
In April 1877, a new school board, now dominated by conservatives, was appointed. Two months later they re-segregated the public school system. Despite the controversy that had surrounded his appointment at Boys Central, E. J. was regarded positively by the new conservative school board. While it was impossible to employ him at the newly segregated Boys Central, the board appointed him as principal of the new Colored High School (also known as Academic School No. 4) in November. One month later, when they opened the Peabody Normal School for Coloreds, they appointed E. J. as both assistant principal and math professor.
E. J.'s job prospects at his new positions were bad. Not only was he now working within a racially segregated school system, but he was doing so at a time when the newly elected conservatives were making severe budget cuts. E. J.'s salary was reduced and was given only limited resources for running the new schools.
To make matters worse, poor finances and racial segregation were not the only problems facing E. J. He also began experiencing serious health issues. The June examinations at the Colored High School were conducted by E. J.'s assistant as illness left him confined to his home. The exact nature of his illness was never described, but health problems were widespread in New Orleans during this time. As a major port city with a humid, subtropical climate, New Orleans had often experienced public health problems, and the situation been made worse by the Civil War as an influx of refugees taxed a public health system already strained by the collapse of civil government. Conditions became especially deadly in 1878 as an epidemic of Yellow Fever swept through the city. Over ten-thousand people died, and a fifth of the population fled the city.
Citing his health problems, E. J. resigned from the Normal School in November 1878. It is unclear how long he remained at the Colored High School, but he had left by 1880. That year he returned to Paris and taught English, French, and mathematics.
E. J. only remained in France a short time as a new opportunity opened up. After major setbacks following the Republicans' 1876 political defeat, Pinchback and his allies were able to pass a bill creating Louisiana's first Historically Black University: Southern University. When the university opened in spring 1881, E. J. was one of the university's first two professors. However, E. J.'s relations with the university trustees was unhappy one. In June, the trustees issued a report criticizing E. J.'s conduct. They accused him of a "frequently absenting himself without giving any reason" and "mainly working rather to the detriment than to the interest of the institution." E. J.'s frequent absences could have been the result of his failing health, but there also seems to have been major conflict between E. J. and the trustees. Over the summer, the trustees began reorganizing the university, and E. J. communicated to the trustees that he was a candidate for the presidency. The trustees did not publicly respond, but they did pass a resolution notifying all the university's professors that their position had been vacated in June. This marked the end of E. J.'s time at Southern University.
After leaving the university, E. J. again left New Orleans, this time for the town of St. Joseph. St. Joseph was a small town of about five hundred people that was in the northeastern part of the state, on the Mississippi River. The move was a natural one in light of E. J.'s health problems as it allowed him to escape the public health problems prevalent in nineteenth century American cities. At St. Joseph, E. J. continued to teach and opened a school. However, he continued to suffer from health problems. Problems became so bad that he was unable to work and ultimately was set to the Louisiana Retreat, a insane asylum. He remained there until his death in 1887.
Sources
1) Zelbo, Sian. “E. J. Edmunds, School Integration, and White Supremacist Backlash in Reconstruction New Orleans.” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2019): 379–406.
2) Zelbo, Sian. (2020). "Edgar Joseph Edmunds (1851 – 1887), Mathematics Teacher at the Center of New Orleans’ Post-Civil War Fight Over School Integration" [doctoral dissertation]. Columbia University.
