Jesse Stone

Jesse Nealand Stone, Jr. (June 17, 1924 – May 14, 2001), was an African-American attorney] and educator from Shreveport, Louisiana, who broke past color barriers in state government.​^[1]

Biography[edit]

A native of rural Gibsland in Bienville Parish, Stone was a son of Jesse, Sr., and the former Ola Walker. He graduated from the defunct Webster High School in nearby Minden.^[1] In 1950, Stone was in the first ever graduating class of the historically black Southern University Law Center, an institution established in 1947 in Baton Rouge. ^[2] For a time, he was the only black attorney in Shreveport,^[3] much as Louis Berry (1914-1998) had filled that role in Alexandria, Louisiana.​^[1]

During the civil rights movement, Stone, a Democrat, was affiliated with the NAACP and worked as well through the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in Chicago in 1942 by James Leonard Farmer, Jr. (1920-1999), and the newer Southern Christian Leadership Conference, established in 1960 in Atlanta, Georgia, by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. During the 1960s, Stone was active in the desegregation of the public schools in Caddo Parish.^[3]​

Stone rose to state prominence during the administration of Governor John J. McKeithen, having filled the positions of associate director of the Louisiana Commission on Human Relations, Rights and Responsibilities and as the assistant state superintendent of education^[3] under Bill Dodd.​

In 1971, Stone became dean of his alma mater, the Southern University Law Center. From 1972 to 1974, he was an appointed associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court during the administration of Governor Edwin Edwards. On July 1, 1974, he returned to the Southern University System to serve as its fourth president, a position that he retained until 1985.^[3] After leaving the presidency, Stone became a law professor at the center but retired in 1986. Thereafter, he was a member of the Southern Board of Supervisors from 1991 to 1995.^[3]​

Stone died in Shreveport of a long illness thirty-four days before his 77th birthday. Survivors included his wife, the former Willa Dean Anderson (born c. 1928), and a daughter, Shonda Deann Stone Williams (born March 10, 1963), a Shreveport attorney and judge. His honorary pallbearers included the civil rights minister Herman Farr of Shreveport. ​Stone is interred at Sheppard Street Cemetery, an historically black resting place across from the Webster Parish School Board office in Minden.^[1]

In 1990, Stone was the first inductee of the Southern University Law Center "Hall of Fame." In 1998, a professorship was endowed in Stone's honor. The Jesse N. Stone Lecture Hall on the campus of Southern University at Shreveport is named in his honor. A video conferencing room inside Stone Hall is named for former U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, Jr., also of Shreveport.^[1]

Stone's tenure over the Southern University system coincided with that of F. Jay Taylor of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, also a native of Gibsland, who was a year older than Stone.

References[edit]

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