Henriette Delille Marker — St. Claude Avenue

In 1813, Henriette Delille was born a free woman of color in New Orleans — a status that came with a prescribed path. Wealthy white men entered arrangements called placéage with mixed-race women, offering financial security in exchange for an institution that stopped short of marriage and full personhood. Delille rejected it outright. She founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in 1842, one of the first religious orders for Black women in the United States. The order operated schools and orphanages for Black children throughout the antebellum South — institutions that existed because the schools white New Orleans built did not admit them. The work continued through the Civil War, through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow. Delille is currently a candidate for canonization. If approved, she would be the first Black American saint. A marker on St. Claude Avenue in the Tremé commemorates her. It stands near the neighborhood where her order took root — the place she chose to build what the city refused to provide.