09/08/2026
Tomb Tuesday|St. Louis No. 2
New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries
Charles Gustave Victor was born on July 9, 1843 into a prosperous Creole family. He was usually referred to by his middle name. His father, François Victor, was a free man of color and a tailor living in the Seventh Ward. Gustave married Victoria Kennedy on December 15, 1868 at St. Joseph Catholic Church.
Victoria gave birth to the couple’s first child at their home on St. Ann Street in the Tremé on July 1, 1872. The Victors christened him Antoine Joseph Henry Victor, but he would go by Anthony Henry Victor, an Anglicized and abbreviated version of his name. Six years later, a daughter, Blanche, joined the household. Gustave Victor supported the family through his work as a clerk in a store and later as a bookkeeper.
When François Victor died in 1888, his funeral cortege departed from Gustave’s current residence on Tremé Street. Two years later, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, mandating that railway cars be segregated by race. This led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation throughout the nation. African Americans and Creoles of African descent were stripped of their rights as citizens, and there was a sharp increase in racially motivated violence. In an effort to protect their children in the Jim Crow South, families of mixed racial ancestry like the Victors made the difficult decision to identify as white.
Upon his death on January 19, 1919, Gustave’s son, now known as Dr. Anthony H. Victor, was a respected dentist with a thriving practice in both New Orleans and Waveland, Mississippi, where he had summered with his family for many years. “His little home and office near the Waveland post office was a mecca for that whole country,” The New Orleans States reported, “[with] no one ever being refused treatment because of the lack of money.” Dr. Victor was personally known to every train crew---from conductor to engineer---on the Louisville and Nashville railroad line, which he would board every Saturday evening during the summer after finishing a work week in New Orleans. The conductor would ask his men, “Dr. Victor aboard?” When they confirmed his presence, the conductor would say, “All right, let’s go.”
Hundreds attended his funeral, despondent over the loss of the forty-six-year-old dentist. Dr. Victor left a wife, Alice Redmond, and two young daughters, Inez, age ten, and Germaine, age seven, to mourn him. He was interred in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. Gustave Victor outlived his son by fourteen years; after funeral services at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, he joined his son in the family tomb.
Tragedy once again struck the family on August 7, 1937 when Germaine Victor died from complications after an appendectomy. She was just twenty-five years old. Germaine was a graduate of Sophie B. Wright High School and New Orleans Normal School. At the time of her death, she was the third and fourth grade teacher at the Robert Davey School on Dryades Street. After her funeral Mass at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, friends, family, fellow teachers, and students said their goodbyes at the Victor tomb in the cemetery in her father’s old neighborhood.
