After sorting through 230 interviews conducted during the course of five years as part of a service learning class, Petra Munro Hendry, education professor, said she began to realize there was a “story to tell” — the saga of the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott, desegregation and a once-thriving community.Hendry’s story became “Old South Baton Rouge: Roots of Hope,” a 2009 book she coauthored with Jay Edwards, anthropology professor.Hendry’s connection with OSBR began in 1994 as part of a project with McKinley High School students to understand the historical significance of their school. Built in 1927, it was one of the first public schools for black people in the deep South.”I wasn’t expecting how multi-ethnic the neighborhood was,” Hendry said. “Even though people couldn’t go to the same churches or schools, you had Italian Americans and German Americans living next to African Americans … [it was] socially segregated, but geographically integrated.”OSBR was the first expansion outside Beauregard Town and Spanish Town, and it was the first official suburb of Baton Rouge, Edwards said. The development began in the early 1900s after the mayor purchased Magnolia Mound Plantation, dividing the Plantation’s sugar cane fields into smaller lots and putting shotgun houses on them.The area grew into a community of black people and immigrants when Standard Oil, present-day Exxon, opened a plant in Baton Rouge. Edwards said, Standard Oil had a “very liberal” policy of hiring skilled workers, regardless of their race. Because of segregation, blacks and Italian Americans built nightclubs, stores and various businesses, Edwards said.”Up until the 1950s and 1960s, the community was really a self-sustaining community,” Edwards said.But with desegregation and the construction of an interstate, the community started to see problems, Hendry said. The interstate divided the community and desegregation caused residents to stop frequenting the often higher-priced businesses in OSBR.”Of course, as the result of the interstate and ironically, desegregation, a lot of well-established upper-middle-class blacks left the neighborhood,” Hendry said. “They could now shop in the other part of the city and live in other parts of the city. It became plagued with more problems of crime and poverty.”The University began its relationship with OSBR in 1994 when then-Chancellor William Jenkins started a task force searching for ways to tie the University to the neighboring community, said Brandon Smith, Equity, Diversity and Community Outreach coordinator. The task force, working with the School of Social Work, worked to identify opportunities for grants and funding.In 1999, the group identified OSBR, Smith said. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gave the University a grant of $400,000 to start a community development program, Smith said. The University received a subsequent grant of $200,000 in 2005. The first grant-funded programs encouraged economic revitalization, neighborhood organizations and community development, while the second sustained them and began additional programs encouraging youth enrichment and home ownership.The funding for OSBR outreach programs, part of the larger Community University Partnership, ended in 2008 at about the same time as the University’s budget crisis began — but the University chose to continue funding the programs.”Those grants phased out right around the time that this budget crisis hit,” Smith said. “We fully appreciate that without the adequate resources, we are limited to what we can do, but we also understand that it takes more than money to build a community.”When the grant expired, the University chose to pay Smith’s salary, the cost of renting the outreach office in OSBR and administrative costs.”There are some funds that have been set aside,” Smith said. “It’s not even close to what you would get through a federal grant … [but] the University is doing what all other universities do across the country.”—-Contact Lindsey Meaux at [email protected]