My first encounter with Dr. was when I was in seventh grade at All Saints Elementary School. As is the custom in most Catholic schools, they have fundraisers for the students, and I was out trying to raise money on my own. , who was then a freshman or so, said, “Why don't you go to Xavier and ask them to buy an ad?” And they referred me to this guy named Dr. Norman Francis, who was a dean.

And he was a nice guy. We sat for about an hour and a half, and he gave me what I thought was, at the time, a very large ad to put in the school paper. It was $25. So my first memory of Dr. Francis was long before any relationship he developed with me or with Rudy.

But the most significant thing is that Rudy and I would meet with Doc often, and Rudy would record some of the conversations and go over what happened during the time when the were brought to Xavier.

It took a lot for Dr. Francis to make that move. If you put it in the proper context of his time, it was a very risky move for him to make in terms of not only endangering Xavier and the students because of the hatred at the time, but also the risk of losing his job. It was not a unanimous kind of decision. At the time, people were afraid for their lives, people were being killed. This was for real, and to make that one decision, to let those people stay in St Michael’s Hall…

When I talked to him about it later, he said, “You know, it was the right thing to do.” He knew it was going to be controversial, but his Christian belief was that these people were injured and needed a place to go.

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Edwin Lombard, longtime Orleans court clerk and appeals court judge, talks about his experiences before he officially retires at the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal in New Orleans, Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, , The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

Dr. Francis is the one who got Rudy out of jail after he was arrested for leading the lunch counter sit-in at McCrory's on Canal Street to protest segregation (his case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he won). Doc used to love to tell this story; he was at Xavier, and there were two recruiters on campus on Xavier campus, one from Harvard and one from Syracuse (where Rudy Lombard would go on to earn a Ph.D) who wanted to talk to Rudy. Rudy had decided that he wasn't coming out of jail. He was going to make a statement while in parish prison.

And Doc told the story that he went back there and the prison guard asked him: Did he represent Rudy? Doc remembered he was a lawyer, and he said, “Yeah, that’s my client.” It was Doc who talked Rudy into coming out after he was arrested to meet those folks.

Edwin A. Lombard is a retired judge who served on Louisiana’s 4th Circuit Court of Appeal.

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