Education, civil rights, medicine, politics – Dr. Joseph Arthur Hardin was involved with them all – but community service appears to have been his passion.

Born in 1875 in Mississippi, Hardin moved to New Orleans when he was 15. Five years later, he was promoting the Republican Party, organizing the Dryades YMCA and fighting racial bias in Louisiana elections. By 1902, he had opened a drugstore and the city’s first formal Black insurance agency. 

Hardin graduated from Sarah Goodridge Memorial Medical School in 1904, and became a Flint-Goodridge Hospital professor of anatomy, physiology, nurse training and materia medica, the study of the origin and properties of remedial substances used in medicine.

In 1912, Hardin organized the Fourth Ward Poll Tax Association. Then in 1918, he worked to get the Valena C. Jones Elementary School built. About 10 years later, he was recognized for “the many services he rendered to the New Orleans community.” 

A photo of Dr. Joseph A. Hardin. Hardin is wearing glasses and a suit and tie.
Dr. Joseph A. Hardin. Credit: Joseph Hardin Papers, Amistad Research Center

But, he was just getting started.

While practicing medicine for 50 years, Hardin:

  • Was appointed Consul for Liberia by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
  • Helped to get several schools built in the 1930s: Johnson Lockett, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, Marie C. Convent and Medard H. Nelson.
  • Was president of the Federation of Civic Leagues, chairman of the Times-Picayune Doll and Toy Fund Christmas Gift Division, vice-chairman of the Lemann Playground Association Executive Committee, a 7th Ward Draft Board Advisory Committee member and a Cross Roads Community Center member. 

After Hardin’s Nov. 15, 1954 death, an elementary school, a park in the 7th Ward and a public housing development were named in his honor. 
“The things he did for himself were gone when he was gone,” the Creole Genealogical and Historical Association states, “but the things he did throughout his life for so many others remain as his legacy.”

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...