Secretary of State Tom Shedler says Louisiana is a melting pot of various cultures and religions. The Secretary credits the influx of French, Spanish and Canadian immigrants for the state’s diversity. We certainly got a taste of that diversity during our week in Baton Rouge. AHTV visited Magnolia Mound, which is one of a few surviving French plantation houses in Baton Rouge. The house is currently decorated in the French Creole style of architecture to represent what it would have looked like when owner Armand Duplantier and his wife Constance lived there in the late 1700s.
Former Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives, Hunt Downer, talked to us about the political career and assassination of infamous Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator Huey P. Long inside the state capitol building where he was shot on September 8th, 1935.
We also took a trip into the vaults of the state’s archives to take a look at some of the city’s oldest documents. The Archives houses all of the original acts of the state’s legislature in a row of leather bound books. Also in the inner vaults are some of the documents from the Republic of West Florida, which only lasted a few months before it was dissolved.
Finally, we also heard some of Baton Rouge’s Civil Rights era stories. A group of LSU journalism students have teamed up with a local journalist to help investigate some of the state’s cold cases including the death of an African American businessman who died after suffering wounds from a fire that was set in his shop. Also, one of the nation’s first bus boycotts started in Baton Rouge. The blueprint of this boycott was used in other more well-known boycotts in Montgomery and Tallahassee in the 1960s.
