User:Flaggingwill/LaForest A. Planving

The Rev. LaForest A. Planving (born Petrus LaForest Albert Plantevigne)

Oscar was the site of substantial racial violence in the decades following the Civil War. In 1903, the founder of a Black school there, the Rev. LaForest A. Planving (born Petrus LaForest Albert Plantevigne) was murdered by local whites who had previously ordered him to leave town and fired shots into his home and the school. A few months later, the American Missionary Association sent another teacher, Alfred Lawless, to Oscar to reopen the school. Whites shot at him in the school, too. After asking local officials for protection, he was instead told to leave town.

Lawless then returned to New Orleans; the first high school in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, Alfred Lawless High School, was named in his honor. His son, who was living with his father in Oscar at the time, became the noted doctor and philanthropist Theodore K. Lawless.