Ironton, a four-block unincorporated town in Plaquemines Parish, had to fight for everything: running water, a sewer system, street lights, paved streets and a natural gas line.

Before 1980, a truck delivered drinking water to Ironton residents twice a week. On the days that the truck did not show up, the residents collected rain in cisterns, Pauline Manuel told the Times-Picayune in 2017. “We had no other choice.”

New Orleans lawyer Earl J. Amedee gave them a choice.

On behalf of the residents, he filed a lawsuit against the parish, which had refused to provide piped running water to the all-Black community. He won.

Earl J. Amedee in 1973.
Earl J. Amedee in 1973. Credit: Louisiana Weekly Photo Collection

“He was not afraid to go down to Plaquemines Parish when other lawyers were intimidated,” said Justice Revius Ortique, as quoted on the Greater New Orleans Chapter of the Louis A. Martinet Society website

Born in 1919, Amedee graduated from Xavier University and earned his law degree from the Howard University School of Law in 1949, after serving in World War II. 

Amedee provided free legal services to Black Americans who were less fortunate and were denied their basic rights. He successfully challenged veteran and diploma privileges used to admit white lawyers to the Louisiana Bar Association, which paved the way for Black lawyers to be admitted without taking an exam, according to Dooky Chase’s Historical Pavers.

In 1950, Amedee became the first Black person in the 20th century to run for public office when he ran for the Orleans Parish School Board. Later that decade, he was appointed as Orleans Parish’s first Black assistant district attorney. He also served as the assistant director of the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation from 1959 to 1962.

Amedee, a founding member and financial secretary of New Orleans’ Louis A. Martinet Legal Society, died in 1990.

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...