Xavier University of Louisiana

Overview

Xavier University of Louisiana is a private historically Black Catholic university in New Orleans — the only Catholic HBCU in the country, and, following the 2000 canonization of its founder Katharine Drexel, the first Catholic university founded by a saint. Drexel, a nun who inherited substantial wealth from her banker father, Francis Drexel, founded and staffed many institutions across the country to educate and evangelize Native American and African American communities, largely through the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the religious order she founded and led as its first Superior General. Aware of the lack of Catholic education for Black youth in the Jim Crow South, she planned a high school in New Orleans on a site previously occupied by Southern University before its 1912 relocation to Baton Rouge; on April 13, 1915, her agent Harry McEnerny purchased the property for $18,000, and she sent Josephite priest Pierre Oscar LeBeau to survey it quietly to avoid controversy, given her well-known reputation for establishing Black schools.