Promised Land — The Leander Perez Estate

The home base of the most powerful political boss in Louisiana outside New Orleans. Leander Perez controlled Plaquemines Parish for decades through a combination of oil revenue, patronage, and racial terror. He swung the parish to the Dixiecrats in 1948 and kept it anti-Democratic at the presidential level for the rest of the century. When the Catholic Church ordered school integration, Perez fought it so viciously that Archbishop Rummel excommunicated him in 1962 — one of the most dramatic acts by the American Catholic Church in the civil rights era. The NRHP-listed mansion in Braithwaite is privately held. Viewable from the road.