FRESHMAN GUARD REECE TAKING BIG LEAP FOR LSU U 1C
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BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
S at u r d ay, F e b r u a ry 28, 2026
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LSU reinstates standardized test score requirement
BATON ROUGE
Rollout of changes to begin summer 2027 BY HALEY MILLER Staff writer
STAFF PHOTOS By JAVIER GALLEGOS
Joan Garner, daughter of civil rights activist John Garner, gives an oral history lesson highlighted on one of 19 utility boxes during the unveiling of the Black History Trail System in downtown Baton Rouge on Friday. The utility boxes along the trail have been beautified and feature text about civil rights events tied to Baton Rouge.
BLACK HISTORY TRAIL UNVEILED
System consists of two parts highlighting major events in city BY CHRISTOPHER CARTWRIGHT Staff writer
On Juneteenth in 1953, Black residents of Baton Rouge launched a bus boycott against the city’s racially segregated bus system — a protest later studied by Martin Luther King Jr. ahead of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Garner v. Louisiana, the first Sit-In Movement lawsuit heard by the high court and a case stemming from three Baton Rouge lunch counter sit-ins fighting segregation. And in 1967, A.Z. Young led more than 600 people in the longest Civil Rights march from Bogalusa to Baton Rouge. These moments in the city’s history are now memorialized along the new East Baton Rouge Parish Black History Trail System, which local leaders unveiled Friday morning downtown. Created in partnership by the Walls Project, Downtown Development District and EnvisionNBR, the trail system consists of two parts: the downtown Greenway Civil Rights Trail and the EnvisioNBR
ä See TRAIL, page 6A
ä See LSU, page 4A
Eric Dexter, left, and David Beach look at one of 19 utility boxes that feature art related to local civil rights events during the unveiling of the Black History Trail System in downtown Baton Rouge on Friday.
“While this trail does center on Black American history, let us be clear, this is American history. It is a story of organized courage, discipline, and innovation and democratic progress, and that is something that we can all be proud of and inspired by. May this trail remind us that Baton Rouge did not just witness change. It innovated, tested and perfected it.” MORGAN UDOH, director of public art for the Walls Project
in his relationship with Jef- media at the outset of the defrey Epstein and saw no signs position. The closed-door deof Epstein’s sexual position ended after abuse as he faced more than six hours hours of grilling from of questioning from lawmakers over his lawmakers who said connections to the he answered every disgraced financier question posed to him. from more than two The deposition in BY STEPHEN GROVES decades ago. Chappaqua, New Associated Press “I saw nothing, and Bill Clinton York, marked the first time a former presiWASHINGTON — Former Presi- I did nothing wrong,” dent Bill Clinton told mem- the former Democratic presi- dent has been compelled to bers of Congress on Friday dent said in an opening state- testify to Congress. It came a that he “did nothing wrong” ment he shared on social day after Clinton’s wife, for-
WEATHER HIGH 81 LOW 52 PAGE 6C
Gun safety event included man accused of murder Nonprofit that paid for talk tied to corruption probe
BY PATRICK SLOAN-TURNER Staff writer
mer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sat with lawmakers for her own deposition. Bill Clinton has also not been accused of any wrongdoing. Yet lawmakers are grappling with what accountability in the United States looks like at a time when men around the world have been toppled from their high-powered posts for maintaining their connections with Epstein after he pleaded
A taxpayer-funded Baton Rouge nonprofit that is now part of a massive corruption investigation paid for a man awaiting trial on a murder charge to speak to children about gun safety and violence, city-parish records show. As part of then-Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome’s Safe, Hopeful, Healthy campaign, the mayor’s healthy city nonprofit paid to have Marvin Payne, 36, speak to children about gun safety alongside Baton Rouge Constable Terrica Williams in June 2022. Though the murder count was later dropped, Payne has been charged with weapons offenses several times over the past eight years and is currently facing trial on allegations that he ran a drug manufacturing operation. The gun safety event was funded by a Safe, Hopeful, Healthy BR contract awarded to Roderick Shannon. Records show at least five monthly payments from the nonprofit to Shannon for $3,041.66 each in mid-2022.
ä See CLINTON, page 5A
ä See EVENT, page 5A
Bill Clinton denies wrongdoing in Epstein case Congressional questioning sheds light on relationship
Students applying to LSU in Baton Rouge will once again need to submit standardized test scores after the Board of Supervisors voted Friday to drop the test-optional policy from the flagship campus. “It will be just another variable that we use in a total comprehensive evaluation of the students,” LSU system President Wade Rousse said. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, applicants have been able to choose whether to include SAT or ACT results. LSU made the test-optional policy official in June 2022, following the trend of other universities that questioned whether test scores serve as a reliable indicator of future academic performance. But Chancellor James Dalton said institutional data no longer supports de-emphasizing standardized test results. For students who chose not to submit scores from 2021 to 2024, average retention rates were 4.3% lower and average first-term GPAs were 0.29 points lower than their counterparts who included scores with their application, according to LSU data. LSU officials said they will not draw a line for how well students must perform on the tests to qualify for admission but rather use the scores as a piece of the portfolio when considering applicants. “We’re not setting a hard minimum for admissions,” Dalton said. “We’re going to use it as one component of our comprehensive evaluation of students.” The change to the admissions policy passed unanimously. Still, some supervisors expressed
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101ST yEAR, NO. 243