So now we have it
They sued to stop a Black university from being pushed out of New Orleans. They lost. Then they went and found somebody who could buy the building.
5116 Magazine Street, New Orleans.
Southern University opened in New Orleans in 1880, on Magazine Street uptown. Over the next thirty years the neighborhood around it got money.
White property owners petitioned the governor to move Southern and its Black students, in the language of the petition, out to the country.
Hundreds of Black residents of New Orleans protested. When protest did not work, they sued. The case is Moss et al. v. Hall et al.
They lost. In 1912 Southern University was moved to Baton Rouge, where it remains. The Magazine Street campus sat empty and was scheduled for auction.
That is where most tellings stop, and it is the wrong place to stop, because the plaintiffs were not done.
The plan
A few of the people who had brought the failed lawsuit devised a second approach. They could not keep Southern. They could put something else on the ground.
They set out to encourage Mother Katharine Drexel — a Philadelphia heiress who had taken vows and directed her inheritance toward schools for Black and Native students — to come to New Orleans, buy Southern's campus, and open a university of her own for, in her words, persons of color.
This is the part the record makes plain and the retellings leave out. Xavier did not arrive in New Orleans. It was recruited there, by the people who had just lost the fight.
The purchase
Drexel came, looked at the property, and understood immediately that she could not buy it as herself.
In a letter to her Sisters she described how she evaluated the property and then quietly engaged white politicians and businessmen to pursue it on her behalf. On April 13, 1915, one of those men secured it at public auction.
Her line to the Sisters is six words.
"...so now we have it."
The price was $18,000. The address was 5116 Magazine Street.
The building opened as Xavier Preparatory School. Vandals broke every window in it.
In 1925 it became Xavier University of Louisiana.
She did it twice
The front-man purchase was not a one-time expedient. It was a working method.
In the late 1920s, when Drexel found land in New Orleans to build the university a real campus, she used a third-party purchasing agent again — for the same reason, to keep the sale from collapsing once the seller learned who the buyer was.
She spent $656,000 on that land and those buildings. When the campus was dedicated in October 1932, a priest looked at the Indiana limestone and said in Latin, O vastum — what a waste.
Drexel did not hear it. She watched the dedication from a third-floor window, away from the platform where the dignitaries sat.
What is actually on that ground
Two universities for Black students have stood on the Magazine Street site. The first was pushed out by its neighbors with the help of the state. The second got there because the people who failed to save the first one went and found a buyer those same neighbors would not refuse.
Xavier University of Louisiana turned a hundred years old in 2025. It is the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States.
It exists because a lawsuit failed and the plaintiffs kept working.
Sources: The Xavier Story Project, xulastory.com, "Founding" — including Mother Katharine Drexel's letter to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament · CreoleGen, "Southern University: From New Orleans to Scotlandville (1880–1914)" · OSV News, "St. Katharine Drexel's legacy endures as Black Catholic university she founded turns 100," October 2025 · Xavier University of Louisiana.
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