Exchange Place Podcast

How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation

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EXCHANGE PLACE is a podcast series that tells the story of a school, The Adult Education Center, whose mission was to train mostly African American women in the skills they needed to integrate the secretarial offices of the Deep South between 1965 and ‘72.

The first season of this podcast follows the inspirational biographies of four of the school’s graduates who changed the moral skyline of New Orleans -- how they did it -- and how the school’s teachers and supporters struggled to overcome the massive forces arrayed against them.

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On a cold December day in 1965, an experimental school known as the Adult Education Center started its first day of classes. Little did they know that over the course of the next seven years, 431 graduates of mostly African American women would go on to make history by integrating the secretarial offices of the Deep South and other parts of the United States.

A day after her wedding, sixteen-year-old Hilda Jean Smith’s mother dies, leaving her the responsibility of raising 10 younger siblings. Though she eventually drops out of high school to do so, Hilda never loses sight that education was the most important stepping stone to a better life. In this interview with Hilda, we hear her incredible story.

Jeanne and Jeff Geoffray are the youngest children of the Adult Education Center’s Director, Alice Geoffray. As frequent visitors to the Center between 1965 and 1972, they witnessed the extraordinary transformation in their mother brought on by her work with the 431 alumnae, which set the stage for her career as the “Mother of Career Education” in Louisiana.

Lorraine Washington suffered through the worst forms of segregation, intimidation, and voting prohibitions during the Jim Crow era. However, the promises [and failures] of job programs during the War on Poverty were equally frustrating. Graduation from such a program – a nursing school – apparently only qualified her for janitorial work at a local hospital.

The Adult Education Center was the brainchild of a young, dashing, charismatic outsider – a Dominican Priest from Illinois. Father Timothy Gibbons reached out to the award-winning teacher Alice Geoffray, a 41-year-old mother of seven, because of her reputation as “the best” business education teacher in the city of New Orleans.

Linda Phoenix Teamer was 19 years old in 1970, the year after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. One of Teamer’s wistful teenage dreams was to become NASA’s first African American female astronaut, but first she had to come to grips with the mysterious forces of social gravity. Although she didn't go to space, she did however break barriers by landing a highly coveted position with the President of Shell Oil and eventually went on to become one of the first African American flight attendants at Delta Airlines.

The Adult Education Center was the inspiration of Father Timothy Gibbons. But, at every stage, Gibbons was guided by one of New Orleans’ most influential educators and civil rights leaders, Norman Francis, the future President of Xavier University. It was Dr. Francis who encouraged Father Gibbons to focus on a vocational school to train women as secretaries because he believed, if it was training Black women for any other profession, no matter how talented those women were, they would simply be handed a mop and broom by an intransigent business community.

Sandra O’Neal was a star student until her sister fell ill. While her mother tended to her sister full-time, Sandra decided to go to work. From that point on, the distraction of proms and other adolescent events lost their meaning. In her search for continuing educational opportunities, Sandra met Alice Geoffray, the Director of the Adult Education Center, and they formed a lifelong bond.

Scores of landlords turned Father Tim Gibbons and Alice Geoffray down as they searched in vain for a location for the Adult Education Center while steering through uncharted and hostile territory. On top of all those challenges, Gibbons was unexpectedly forced to leave his post in New Orleans for causing a political “Hullabaloo.” In a shocking twist, he nominates Alice, a 41-year-old mother of seven with no administrative experience, and no appetite for political upheaval, to take over the program.

Pam Cole was the youngest of four sisters to graduate from the Adult Education Center between 1965 and 1972. Her sister, Carol Cole, was a graduate of the first class who became one of the first African American secretaries at a major oil company. The AEC played a pivotal role in the life of her family, but the real story of the Cole sisters, and their ideal parents, is a testament to the strength and resiliency of the New Orleans African American community itself.

The musical score of Pam Cole’s teenage years included the mellifluous sound of her sister Carol Cole practicing typing while Pam fell asleep in the adjoining room of their small, shotgun house in New Orleans’ storied 7th Ward. After graduating from the Adult Education Center in 1971, Pam used her typing skills to achieve independence as a secretary in the Virgin Islands, New York, Houston, and Atlanta. In company after company, Pam is the only, or one of the few Black women.

Season 1 of Exchange Place culminates with the story of a single mom named Alice Geoffray, the first Director of The Adult Education Center. With seven children back home and no administrative experience, Alice courageously stepped into the role of a lifetime as widespread antipathy against educating women of color brewed in the wake of a newly desegregated Deep South.