NEW ORLEANS (OSV News) -- Norman C. Francis, who began his 47-year tenure as president of Xavier University of Louisiana on the day Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and became a national icon for education and racial justice, died Feb. 18 at Ochsner Hospital. He was 94.
Xavier was opened in 1925 by St. Katharine Drexel as the only Black Catholic university in the Western Hemisphere. Under Francis' leadership, it became an educational powerhouse that regularly placed more African American graduates into medical school than any other U.S. university.
When Francis retired in June 2015, he was the longest-tenured college president in the United States. During his near half-century of service, he was recognized with 42 honorary doctorates and with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, in 2006, a year after Hurricane Katrina swamped Xavier's mid-city New Orleans campus only to resume on-campus courses six months later.
A Catholic, Francis received the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal in 2019.
By April 4, 1968, Francis had already served for 11 years as Xavier's executive vice president when he traveled to Bensalem, Pennsylvania, to meet with the leadership of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, founded by Mother Katharine. The sisters had decided to appoint him as the university's first lay president.
After that meeting, Francis called home. His son, Michael, told him the Rev. King had been shot.
In an interview with the Clarion Herald in 2014, Francis recalled that as the son of a barber and a loving mother from Lafayette, Louisiana, neither of whom had graduated from high school, he had been called to make a difference.
Francis' father had yearned for his son to become a bigtime lawyer.
"My daddy went to his grave never forgiving me for not practicing law," Francis said. "This was in the separate-but-equal days. I was a (Loyola University New Orleans) law school graduate. He knew I was going to be offering cases before judges who went to the same law school. My dad would tell me, 'If you stand before the judge, the judge can't tell you you don't know what you're talking about because you got your degree from the same place he got it.' That's the way he thought. He just knew I was going to be a millionaire lawyer."
Francis could have been many things -- lawyer, businessman, politician.
"There were those of us who thought he might be a great candidate for mayor," said Jesuit Father James Carter, who served as president of Loyola University New Orleans from 1974 to 1995 and was a close friend. "He is bright, articulate and has a very winning personality. And, he's a long-distance runner, obviously."
Violence and death -- everything Rev. King had opposed with every fiber of his being -- could not snuff out the light ignited by faith and education, Francis thought.
"I was one lawyer who could have done a few things," Francis said in that 2014 interview. "Now, I sit back and see a number of lawyers, teachers, physicians, dentists and social workers that hopefully I had some part in educating. It's like throwing a rock into the water."
The ripple effect of Francis on Xavier and on an entire region is impossible to overstate. Where would New Orleans have been without Francis for the past half-century?
"It certainly would not be as laid-back and peaceful a place as it has been," Father Carter said.
There were so many obstacles. When Francis became the first African American to graduate from Loyola Law School in 1955, he and his classmates were visited by a member of the New Orleans Bar Association. The recruiter went down the line passing out application forms, but when he came to Francis, he intentionally skipped over him.
One of Francis' white classmates, standing behind him, said, "Well, if he can't join, I can't join," tossing the membership form on the floor.
Even before Francis became Xavier president, he was always the cool head during the Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s. Francis helped peacefully resolve in New Orleans what had become a powderkeg in other Southern cities -- the refusal of white restaurants to serve African American patrons.
After working behind the scenes with business leaders, Francis assigned Xavier students to assemble at a nearby drug store with a lunch counter. "At the appointed hour -- 2 o'clock -- they were sent there," Francis said. "The waitresses had been told to serve them, and that was it."
Desegregating the New Orleans Public Service buses also was done below the radar. Under the old system, Blacks were required to sit to the rear of a movable sign that read: "Colored only." The bus driver determined if a person sat in front of or behind the sign.
Francis came up with the solution. His group told the officials: "When the buses go to the barn at midnight Tuesday night, you instruct the bus drivers to say nothing, and you instruct the maintenance workers to take the signs off the buses. We'll send the word for people to sit where they want to sit. We knew the legal challenge would surely prevail."
In 1961, when Francis served as dean of students, Francis welcomed the Freedom Riders to Xavier's campus and housed the Civil Rights activists in a dormitory after they had been attacked by white supremacists in Alabama. In 1987, St. John Paul II recognized that history when he spoke to U.S. Catholic educators in the campus' quadrangle.
Francis has been called a miracle worker, but he always insisted that it was St. Katharine Drexel's faith and God's providence that provided the miracle that is Xavier University. St. Katharine, the daughter of a millionaire Philadelphia banker, used her inheritance to build Xavier and dozens of schools, universities and churches across the country for African Americans and Native Americans.
The terms of her father's will dictated that the funds she used for her educational endeavors would end upon her death. She was 96 when she died in 1955.
"There were any number of miracles that the Lord provided through her, and we've always called Xavier a miracle," Francis said. "Xavier is a miracle, not just for all it has done, but for the mere fact that it has survived and thrived. Under normal circumstances, that shouldn't have been the case. If she (St. Katharine Drexel) had died at the normal age of 70, which at that time would have been a big age, Xavier would have struggled. God allowed her to live until she was 96, and we had that interest available for many more years. It's still a struggle every day, but people know we have a meaning."
Francis always said his proudest achievements were the thousands of Xavier graduates who would go on to change lives.
"My greatest moments are on commencement day," Francis said. "I can't tell you the pride and joy I have with a diploma in my hand, looking over at the next student who's standing on top of the steps, knowing that I've got their diploma. The look on their faces. … They've worked four or five years of sacrificing, and here in the next 30 seconds, they're going to get that diploma. That, for me, has kept me going."
Francis' wife, Blanche Macdonald Francis, died in 2015. Survivors include four sons, two daughters and 11 grandchildren.
Francis' body will lie in repose at Xavier University March 2, with visitation followed by a funeral Mass March 3 at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.
