John McDonogh

John McDonogh was an American entrepreneur whose adult life was spent in south Louisiana and later in Baltimore. He made a fortune in real estate and shipping, and as a slave owner, he supported the American Colonization Society, which organized transportation for freed people of color to Liberia. He had devised a manumission scheme whereby the people he held as enslaved could "buy" their own freedom, which took them some 15 years. In his will he provided large grants for the public education of children of poor whites and freed people of color in New Orleans and Baltimore, and by the 1970s some 20 schools in the New Orleans public school system were named for him.