Exchange Place
How a Small, Struggling School Helped Transform Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation
By Jeanne Geoffray and Jeff Geoffray
“My daughter will never pick cotton.”
“When my fellow classmates and I walked through the school’s doors, we exchanged a life of poverty for prosperity.”
Exchange Place recounts how the Adult Education Center, its determined graduates, and its director and faculty put everything on the line to transform the segregated workplaces of New Orleans and the country during the 1960s and early 1970s.
The little New Orleans school trained Black women to integrate the largest corporations in America as secretaries, becoming a powerhouse of social justice and social change. The school placed 94 percent of its predominantly Black graduates in jobs with salaries above the national average for working white or Black women in comparable positions. It was the most successful program of its kind in Louisiana during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Exchange Place is a history of the school that explains why, and an unforgettable story of courage and sacrifice during the 1960s civil rights era.
The students and teachers of the Adult Education Center brought the business community of New Orleans together to make changes that were decades—no, generations—overdue, changes that challenged a legacy of white supremacy. By telling the story of what was considered a radical experiment for its time, it is the authors’ hope that Exchange Place can provide lessons for America today.
About the Authors
Jeanne Geoffray and Jeff Geoffray
Jeanne Geoffray
Co-Author
Jeanne Geoffray is the co-author of Exchange Place and the daughter of Dr. Alice Geoffray. She graduated from the University of New Orleans in 1975 with a bachelor’s in sociology. She went straight into business at a major U.S. corporation, becoming the first female to hold a sales management position in its Dallas-Ft. Worth office. Since 2001, she has worked as a consultant at the North Texas Health Care Laundry, one of the top five healthcare laundries in the United States, washing 50,000 pounds of linen per year.
The journey to write and publish Exchange Place began in 1998 when Dr. Alice Geoffray had a stroke and Jeanne began to care for her in New Orleans. There, Jeanne realized the historical importance of documenting the story of Exchange Place and how imperative it was to interview its graduates while they still lived.
Jeanne is happily married to attorney Julian Buenger, who has supported and assisted her and Jeff Geoffray in this endeavor. Even with a highly rewarding and fulfilling career, no aspect of it is as important to Jeanne as sharing the civil rights history of the Adult Education Center to a larger audience, and inspiring and educating generations to come with its story.
Jeff Geoffray
Co-Author
Jeff Geoffray is the co-author of Exchange Place and the son of Dr. Alice Geoffray. For over three years he has been working with his sister, Jeanne Geoffray, to create the nonprofit The 431 Exchange. Its mission is to continue the Adult Education Center’s legacy, promoting educational initiatives that seek to eliminate poverty and strengthen the well-being of students and teachers.
Jeff is a graduate of the acclaimed University of Southern California School of Cinema. Since graduating, Jeff has produced, financed, or served as an executive on over 150 movies, along with many music videos, documentaries, and television shows.
Jeff has been involved in major releases such as Disney's Holes and James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss, and deeply involved in his movies’ marketing and distribution.
In 2015, he and his partners raised one hundred million for the VX119 Media Fund to finance movies. Under that banner, he was the executive producer of films like Under the Silver Lake (Andrew Garfield), Berlin, I Love You (Helen Mirren), and Spinning Man (Pierce Brosnan). Jeff is also a musician and composer who has written and performed on two of his own albums. One tune, Bring Me Rain, reached No. 13 on the 2003 adult contemporary charts.
