The Story Behind Our Logo

If you’ve seen our logo, you’ve seen the schoolhouse. What you might not know is that it’s based on a real place: West Oak Lane Elementary, a one-room school in Maringouin, Louisiana, where generations of Descendants were educated after emancipation.

In communities like Maringouin following emancipation, access to education was never guaranteed. Resources were limited and systems were exclusionary, but education held the power to open doors to self-determination and survival.

For the Foundation, the one-room schoolhouse in our logo stands for the power of education to open those doors, for the need for education and understanding in our society, and for the truth that conquers falsehood. Joseph M. Stewart, Co-Founder of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, attended West Oak Lane Elementary in the 1940s. His teachers taught him many things, but his own history — and the history of Maringouin, a town whose population is largely composed of Descendants of Jesuit slaveholding — was not taught.

DTRF is not only educating the world about this history but also creating educational opportunities for the descendants of that history — the very education and self-determination their enslaved ancestors were denied. The schoolhouse in our logo is a reminder of what is possible despite the continuing existence of injustice, and a promise that erasing injustice will only make us stronger. Like a testament to those principles, the West Oak Lane Schoolhouse still stands today.