After white homeowners drive Southern University out of New Orleans, Mother Katharine Drexel secretly buys Southern’s former campus, where she opens Xavier University Preparatory School.
Xavier Normal School opens, training teachers to work in Black schools all across the South.
Xavier opens a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It's the only Catholic college in the country for people of color, and the first Catholic college to admit both men and women.
Xavier’s War Production Training Unit trains Black men and women for jobs in war industries. Louisiana employers do not hire them, however, until Xavier strikes a deal with Higgins Industries in New Orleans.
72 Xavier and Dillard students are arrested when, returning from a basketball game on a bus with only one white passenger aboard, they toss the bus’s racial dividing sign on the floor and sit wherever they want.
Xavier’s Sister Mary Elise Sisson defies Louisiana’s segregation laws by staging operas for interracial audiences. The shows sell out.
Xavier Senior Class President Rudy Lombard (XU ’61) is arrested for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter. He sues, and the US Supreme Court rules that state laws denying service based on a customer’s race are unconstitutional.
Xavier’s Sisters publicly condemn forced segregation as a violation of Scripture. Some local residents call the Sisters “depraved” and “communists,” but Xavier students hold a rally to thank them.
Xavier Senior Class President Rudy Lombard helps organize the first "Freedom Ride" across the South. After the Freedom Riders are beaten, arrested, and firebombed, Xavier Dean of Men Norman C. Francis arranges a safe haven for them at St. Michael's dorm.
Xavier students, staff and alumni organize to help Black voters register, a process that, at that time in Louisiana, includes a written test, an oral test, and a "moral" and "character" test.
College protests sweep the country, including at Xavier, where students demand more Black representation on the faculty and in the curriculum.
Norman Francis becomes Xavier's first Black, lay president. He will go on to serve for 47 years, the longest term of any university president in US history.
Dr. J.W. Carmichael starts teaching at Xavier. For the next 50 years, experts will cite his methods as a model of success for producing Black doctors and scientists.
Ernest “Dutch” Morial (XU ’51) becomes the first Black mayor of New Orleans.
Mother Katharine Drexel becomes Saint Katharine Drexel when she is canonized by Pope John Paul II.
Xavier President Norman Francis is appointed to lead Louisiana’s recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina.
Xavier’s “Hurricane Class” of 2006 graduates. The US Senator from Illinois and future US President Barack Obama gives their commencement address.
Xavier President Norman Francis is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Dr. C. Reynold Verret, a distinguished biochemist and immunologist who grew up in Haiti and New York City, becomes Xavier’s new president.
LaToya Cantrell (XU ’96) is elected Mayor of New Orleans. She is the first woman—and the second Xavier graduate—to serve as the city’s mayor.
The Center for Equity, Justice, and the Human Spirit at Xavier is founded to promote scholar activism in the fields of education, criminal justice, and environmental sustainability.