Our Community

Oakville, Louisiana is a small rural Afro-American community located on the Highway 23 west bank of Plaquemines Parish. The community is only about 20 minutes south from New Orleans.

The Oakville community was established in 1869 following the Civil War era and the life was crushingly harsh and overwhelmingly poor. The only employment opportunities were narrowly assigned to common labor in the local agricultural fields or that of a household domestic. Life was made terribly difficult by the existence of a highly racist, toxic, and segregated political system.

A single one-room school house with one teacher given the role of addressing all 12 grade levels of school education was the normal policy of affording educational support and opportunities to the Oakville community. The rural school textbooks were second-hand products that had been newly supplied and used in the predominantly white schools. Segregation allowed the white schools to have yearbooks that chronologized the lives of students as they moved though their valuable high school years. The black schools were so poorly supported to the extent that yearbooks were not provided. Consequently, all black students had to rely upon their memory to retain the joyful academic experiences of their youth days.