By Megan Sayles
AFRO Staff Writer
msayles@afro.com
For 93-year-old Verlie Rodriguez Decay and 91-year-old Hortense Haydel Reine, attending Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) and pursuing a degree was never up for debate. The New Orleans natives both had parents who knew early on that a college education would define their daughter’s futures. Although they were not in the same class, Decay and Reine met each other after their college years and formed a friendship.
Their campus experience looked very different from that of young people today. Tuition hovered around $200 per semester. Term papers were written by hand, and research was done in library stacks rather than on computer screens. Women were barred from wearing pants. Schools—along with much of public life—were segregated.
“They didn’t say ‘HBCUs’ in those days because there were no other schools we could go to,” said Reine. “We couldn’t go to Tulane or Loyola or Saint Mary’s Dominican because they wouldn’t take Blacks.”
Despite these barriers, Decay and Reine were ahead of their time. In the 1940s and ‘50s, less than 5 percent of Black women aged 22-28 earned bachelor’s degrees, according to a 2011 study on gender gaps in education attainment. Still, Black women were slightly more likely than Black men to graduate college.
For Reine’s fellow alumna, Decay, those limits were felt in the everyday realities of being a student in segregated New Orleans.
“We weren’t allowed to use the city libraries. If you went in, they gave you all kinds of excuses about why you couldn’t check the books out and why you couldn’t use them,” said Decay. “We just had to make do, and we did the best we possibly could with what we had there on campus.”
Despite these exclusions, the pair say XULA students and the broader community fostered their own spaces for social and cultural life.
“There were always social clubs, hotels and restaurants downtown where we were not allowed to go into, so we had our own social clubs,” said Decay. “We had church organizations that had events. We had our own little dances and little halls around the city.”
Both Decay and Reine said their social lives were full. Football games, sock hops and student activities organized by sororities and fraternities offered a sense of normalcy and joy. The friendships they formed on campus often lasted decades.
“We had our own inner circle of friends. I had no problem with anything,” said Reine. “We just did our thing and had our own life and culture.”
At the time, Black women’s career prospects were confined by a combination of racial and gender barriers. Reine and Decay explained that nursing, teaching and pharmacy were among the few fields that could guarantee employment after graduation. Both women ultimately decided to study elementary education at XULA and went on to have long careers as teachers.
Reine taught elementary school in New Orleans for nearly 30 years, while Decay began her career during a post-war school boom before later teaching both children and adults through U.S. military programs overseas. Decay’s four children even followed in her footsteps, later becoming XULA graduates themselves.
More than 70 years later, both women still think fondly about their experiences at the small, historically Black Catholic university, which has grown from a handful of buildings to a sprawling campus with green roofs and modern facilities since their days there.
“I feel so proud to say that I went to Xavier because to me it was like the Canterbury of New Orleans for Blacks. It was a top-notch school, and the nuns really laid a good foundation for us,” said Reine. “I just loved going there.”
