Articulating a Vision: Free Black Social Networks, Property Ownership, and the Founding of L’Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents in New Orleans

In 1847 a group of prominent free men of color in New Orleans founded L’Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents, a school for free black children. The Catholic Institution fulfilled the bequest of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent, a free woman of color who left instructions in her will for a school to be built on her property. Staffed and administered by free people of color, the Catholic Institution served as an important crucible of leadership for the Afro-Creole community from 1850s through the Jim Crow era.  According to the 1911 account of Rodolphe Desdunes, the founders created the school at the behest of a white priest, Father Maenhaut. Couvent specifically named Maenhaut to oversee the school, but Desdunes claimed that the priest first informed the original founders about Couvent and her bequest. While scholarship on the school recognizes Couvent as the original benefactress, it fails to delineate her connections with the men who established the school.

This paper challenges Desdunes’ assumption that the free black organizers of the Catholic Institution were unaware of Couvent and her bequest prior to the intervention of a white priest. Using notary and sacramental records, I trace the social ties linking Couvent to the free men of color who articulated her vision of a school for orphans of color in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. Couvent’s philanthropic bequest and the subsequent creation of a school on her property grew out of her own sense of the needs of her community and came to fruition as a culmination of the relationships she formed over time in New Orleans. Re-examining the founding of the Catholic Institution through this perspective demonstrates how free people of color in New Orleans built a community through social ties, property, and collective institutions as the center of slavery shifted to the Deep South.