“When I went into the Army, I never dreamed … that I would become a lawyer,” prominent civil rights attorney Lolis Edward Elie told interviewers. An Army buddy planted the legal seed. 

“Frank (D’Amico) and I would go and have coffee at the PX,” Elie said during a 2012 interview with Loyola University professor Justin A. Nystrom and journalist Jack Davis. “He was always telling me that I was very smart and that I should become a lawyer.

Nils Douglas, Lolis Edward Elie and Robert Collins. Credit: Courtesy of Lolis Edward Elie

“I went home one of those nights and wrote my mother a letter and said, ‘If I get out of this army alive, I’m gonna become a lawyer.’”

That’s what he did. 

After a year at Howard University, Elie transferred and graduated from Dillard University. He was one of the first Black people to graduate from Loyola University College of Law in 1959. He immediately opened a law firm with Nils R. Douglas and Robert F. Collins. 

Later that year, the Louisiana Consumers’ League hired Elie as its attorney, which started his journey toward handling significant legal cases in the fight to end segregation in New Orleans. He also represented the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP and Black Panthers. 

“The most important thing that came out of it (the movement) was the rising of consciousness on the part of African American people,” Elie said during the 2003 Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival

Having served as an assistant district attorney and a Civil District Court judge, Elie died in 2017 at 87.

“I was always proud of my father and his work,” said Elie’s son Lolis Eric, a screenwriter and former Times-Picayune columnist. An infant during the movement, Lois Eric added that “all the Black and half the white folks” he met as an adult knew his father and mother Gerri M. Elie. “It felt good because they always had good things to say about them.”

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...