Thomy Lafon

Thomy Lafon was born on the twenty-eighth of December 1810 at the French Quarter of New Orleans, the son of Pierre Lafon — a French Haitian carpenter of refugee Saint-Domingue origin who had arrived in New Orleans in 1809 in the wake of the Haitian Revolution — and Modeste Foucher, a free woman of colour of the Vieux Carré shopkeeper community. He was raised in the bilingual French-and-English Catholic Afro-Creole community of the antebellum French Quarter.

He was placed at twelve at the Sainte Barbe Academy at the rue Royale — the principal Catholic French-Quarter primary school for free persons of colour of the antebellum period — and was apprenticed at fourteen to the Bourbon Street dry-goods merchant Joseph Augustin Le Coq.

He opened in 1832 at twenty-two his own dry-goods commission house at 33 Esplanade Avenue — at the Faubourg Marigny border of the Vieux Carré — and moved by 1845 to the moneylending business at the same address. He charged at the height of his moneylending career across the closing years of the 1840s the standard New Orleans interest rate of twelve percent per annum to the Vieux Carré planter community on advances against forthcoming cotton and sugar consignments.

He accumulated through the moneylending and the rental of the inherited Vieux Carré properties of his mother across the following four decades a personal fortune that had reached six hundred thousand dollars by the time of his death — the rough equivalent of twenty million dollars in the dollars of the current period — at the time the largest Black estate in the post-bellum American South.

He never married and made his principal philanthropy across his lifetime the support of the Catholic Black orphanages of New Orleans — among them the Société Catholique pour l’Instruction des Orphelins dans l’Indigence and the Lafon Asylum at the rue Tonti — and the support of the New Orleans University, the Straight University, and the Holy Family Sisters of New Orleans.

He bequeathed in his will of 1890 over four hundred thousand dollars to the New Orleans Black charitable institutions of the city — the largest single charitable bequest by a Black American in the nineteenth century.

He was the principal underwriter of the Plessy v. Ferguson legal-defence fund of the Comité des Citoyens of New Orleans between 1891 and 1896 — though he did not live to see the eventual Supreme Court decision of May 1896.

He died at New Orleans on the twenty-second of December 1893 of complications of a heart attack, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the principal Black landlord of the Vieux Carré.