New Orleans Historical

Dorothy Day: Journalist, Activist, Catholic Worker Movement Founder

2020-06-30T23:00:28+00:00

In 1924, journalist and political activist Dorothy Day lived in an apartment at 520 St. Peter Street while writing for the New Orleans Item. During her short time working at the newspaper, Day wrote articles generally concerned with the culture of dance halls, alcohol, and gambling in the city. Day also conducted interviews with personalities like Italian actress Eleonora Duse, Governor Henry L. Fuqua, and boxing legend Jack Dempsey. [1] Before her arrival in New Orleans, Dorothy Day was a political activist. Day was a suffragette, arrested for picketing the Wilson White House, and went on a hunger strike while imprisoned. In 1927, Day converted to Catholicism and later founded the Catholic Worker Movement in New York with Frenchman Pierre Maurin. [2] The Catholic Worker Movement is an organization dedicated to aiding the poor by engaging in labor organizing, nonviolent protests against war and violence, establishing cooperatives, and advocating for human rights. [3] In 1933, Day co-founded Catholic Worker, a radical Christian newspaper covering workers’ rights and social issues, and served as its editor until her death in 1980.

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Aimée Potens Residence

2019-11-10T01:37:01+00:00

Aimée Potens was the mother of Louis Charles and Jean Baptiste Roudanez, the founder and publisher of L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper, and the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper. She was born to an enslaved woman in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the late eighteenth century. [1] Aimée eye-witnessed the long arc of Atlantic and Carribean world history: slavery; the Haitian revolution; exodus to colonial Louisiana; the Louisiana Purchase; territorial plantation life; all things de couleur libre in antebellum New Orleans; the Civil War; emancipation; the birth of the South’s first Civil Rights movement via her sons’ activism; and in her final years the triumph and failure of Reconstruction.

Potens escaped the ferocity of the Haitian revolution as an infant in arms, eventually finding a home on the sugar plantations of St. James Parish Louisiana. There she had children with another Saint-Domingue refugee, Jean Louis Roudanez. There she honed her skills as a healer. And there, those long, strong hands delivered babies, enslaved and free.

Aimée later lived as a femme de couleur libre or free woman of color in antebellum New Orleans. By then a single mother, she raised her children in one of the largest and most prosperous free black communities in the United States. Madame Potens proudly wore a tignon, the headscarf required in colonial times as a reminder of “inferior” status. In the nineteenth century, Marie Laveau and other New Orleans women of African descent defiantly sported the tignon as a symbol of beauty. And like the voodoo priestess, family lore reveals Aimée as a powerful and proud healer—“a tall mulatress of stately mein”—who walked the streets liked she owned the city. [1] Potens, her surname, suggests potent heritage. Indeed, in her day, free women of color were powerful in many ways, often owning property and managing businesses in the French Quarter and the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny.

Aimée Potens is entombed in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2., Square 3.

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Economy Hall

2019-11-03T03:43:43+00:00

Soon after Union forces seized New Orleans from the Confederacy in 1862, calls for equality reverberated among free people of color. Hundreds assembled at frequent mass meetings and rallies at Economy Hall in the heart of Faubourg Tremé. There, boisterous crowds listened to speakers advocate for racial democracy and the enfranchisement of all men of African descent. The newspapers L’Union, and later the New Orleans Tribune, frequently promoted and reported on these dramatic gatherings. “Grande Assemblée à L’Économie, Immense Enthousiasme,” recounted L’Union in 1863. [1] “A vast and enthusiastic assemblage met last evening at Economy Hall,” reported the Tribune in 1864. [2] “One of the most largely attended assemblies ever held in this city met last night at Economy Hall,” declared the Tribune in 1865.

In December 1863, Economy Hall played host to over 1,000 free men of color as they signed a petition demanding the right to vote. The document boldly proclaimed, “We are men, treat us as such.” Attached to it was an addendum that included “those born slaves” in the demand. [3] New Orleans Tribune publisher Jean Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau, veteran of the First Louisiana Native Guard, delivered the aforementioned petition to President Abraham Lincoln in the White House. The petition influenced the President, who likely saw political advantage in restricting the vote to free blacks only. Lincoln quickly asked Louisiana’s governor to consider limited black enfranchisement, and the President addressed the issue in his last public address. Lincoln's suggestion was ignored by the governor and state legislature. [4]

Economy Hall held benefit programs, sponsored by the New Orleans Tribune, featuring classical composers of color. Victor-Eugène Macarty, Basile Barés, Edmond Dédé, and others performed to help fund the Tribune’s Freedmen’s Aid Association. [5] “The cause of universal suffrage is every day becoming more popular with the young people of our city. Two balls will be given today at Economy Hall in behalf of the favorite cause,” reported the Tribune. “One will be a children’s ball, which will be given at 4 o’clock and last til 8. Then young men and young ladies will come out in their best attires, in their gay and glittering dresses, and their quadrilles and waltzes will last til morning.” [6]

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Residence of Jean Baptiste Roudanez

2019-11-03T03:41:32+00:00

Jean Baptiste Roudanez (1815-1895), a free man of color, served as publisher of L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper, and the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper. Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, the Tribune’s founder, was Jean Baptiste’s younger brother. Jean Baptiste Roudanez’s home still stands on Dumaine Street in the Faubourg Tremé.

In 1864, he traveled from this residence, alongside Arnold Bertonneau, a fellow free man of color and veteran of the First Louisiana Native Guard, to present President Lincoln with a petition signed by almost 1,000 free men of color, demanding black men’s right to vote. The Petition righteously proclaimed “WE ARE MEN, TREAT US AS SUCH!” Roudanez and Bertonneau impressed Lincoln, and the President quickly penned a request to Louisiana’s governor to consider limited black enfranchisement. The Petition’s demand for voting rights for all men of African descent, “WHETHER BORN SLAVE OR FREE,” [1] was realized in September 1867, nearly 3 years before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. Black Louisianans turned out in large numbers, electing many delegates of African descent to the upcoming state constitutional convention. Following his meeting with Lincoln, Jean Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau toured New England to speak at abolitionist meetings. Roudanez met Frederick Douglass in Boston and made a lasting impression upon him. Douglass later wrote to Jean Baptiste, stating he read the Tribune “with very great pleasure. I am proud that a press so true and wise is devoted to the interests of liberty and equality in your Southern latitude.” [2] Douglass felt the paper was an essential tool for the success of the abolitionist movement.

Jean Baptiste Roudanez testified before the 1864 Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission investigation of the condition of enslaved Louisianans. The Commission's report described him as "a free mulatto creole of New Orleans, a man of great intelligence and probity, who had been employed as an engineer and mechanic upon many of the sugar plantations in the region of the country under consideration. No man could have had a more thorough acquaintance with plantation life than he, and no man in the city of his residence bears a higher reputation for truth and sobriety.” Roudanez told the Commission "Upon some plantations the women were worked as hard as the men, and were kept at labor in every stage of pregnancy, even up to the moment of delivery. The overseers had the run of all the field women, and if one of them refused, an occasion was soon found for subjecting her to a severe punishment. The practice of indiscriminate intercourse...was a source of great suffering to these women. Frequently the jealous wife would procure them to be whipped...The tortures inflicted upon these helpless favorites of the husband by the infuriated wife, in order to render them less attractive to the husband, are not to be described." [3]

Jean Baptiste Roudanez is entombed in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2., Square 3.

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Tombs of Jean Baptiste Roudanez and his mother Aimée Potens

2019-11-03T00:56:55+00:00

Jean Baptiste Roudanez, publisher of L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper, and the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper, is entombed alongside his mother Aimée Potens, a free woman of color, in Square 3 of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. This section of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 honors many civil rights pioneers of African descent, including Henriette Delille, Rodolphe Desdunes, Arthur Esteves, André Callioux, Jordan Noble, Marie Couvent, P.B.S. Pinchback, Oscar Dunne and many others. Square 3 has been described as “the greatest collection of memorials to African-American achievement in the world.”

Roudanez and fellow activist Arnold Bertonneau delivered a historic petition to President Lincoln on March 12, 1864, demanding the right to vote. Signed by almost 1,000 free men of color from New Orleans, the document righteously proclaimed “WE ARE MEN, TREAT US AS SUCH!” For the first time, Louisianans of African descent boldly entered the whitest house in America, the inner sanctum of the country’s authority. They were frustrated with Lincoln’s gradualism and general failure to support the growing national movement for racial equality. [1]

The petition’s demand for voting rights for all men of African descent, “WHETHER BORN SLAVE OR FREE,” [2] was realized in September 1867, nearly 3 years before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. Black Louisianans turned out in large numbers, electing an almost equal number of black and white delegates who would go on to create the South’s most radical Reconstruction state constitution.

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Tomb of Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez

2019-11-03T00:49:21+00:00

Faubourg Tremé is home to the oldest existing cemetery in the City of New Orleans, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, founder of the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper, is entombed in the Roudanez family tomb located in Alley 9. The doctor’s wife, Célie Saulay, and several of their children are also in this tomb. Access is permitted only with approved tour guides. When in the cemetery, be sure to ask your guide to see the Roudanez tomb.

On March 11, 2015, a historical marker was unveiled at the tomb site to honor Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez and his civil rights advocacy during the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras. The marker reads:

DR. LOUIS CHARLES ROUDANEZ

1823-1890

“LIBERTY MUST BE THE SAME FOR ALL MEN. IF LIBERTY IS QUALIFIED, THOSE WHO POSSESS THE

LEAST RIGHTS ARE NOT REALLY FREE. WE DEMAND THEREFORE, LIKE ALL OTHER CITIZENS:

THE RIGHT TO COME AND GO;

THE RIGHT TO VOTE;

THE RIGHT TO PUBLIC INSTRUCTION;

THE RIGHT TO HOLD PUBLIC OFFICE;

THE RIGHT TO BE JUDGED, TREATED AND GOVERNED ACCORDING TO THE COMMON LAW.”

-New Orleans Tribune, January 24, 1865

LOUIS CHARLES ROUDANEZ WAS A VISIONARY FREE MAN OF COLOR, DOCTOR, AND JOURNALIST. GREATLY INFLUENCED BY REVOLUTIONS IN SAINT-DOMINGUE AND FRANCE, AND ANGERED BY SLAVERY AND RACIAL INJUSTICE, HE TOOK UP THE CAUSE OF EQUALITY DURING THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION ERAS. IN 1862, DR. ROUDANEZ, PAUL TRÉVIGNE, AND JEAN BAPTISTE ROUDANEZ FOUNDED L’UNION, THE SOUTH’S FIRST BLACK NEWSPAPER. IN 1864, DR. ROUDANEZ LAUNCHED LA TRIBUNE DE LA NOUVELLEORLÉANS (THE NEW ORLEANS TRIBUNE), THE FIRST BLACK DAILY NEWSPAPER IN THE UNITED STATES. WITH HIS TRIBUNE COLLEAGUES AND A DYNAMIC COMMUNITY OF FREE AND FREED PERSONS OF AFRICAN DESCENT, ROUDANEZ COURAGEOUSLY ATTACKED RACISM IN THE FACE OF SOME OF THE NATION’S WORST VIOLENCE. HE WAS THE GUIDING FORCE BEHIND ONE OF THE MOST RADICAL AND INFLUENTIAL JOURNALS OF ITS TIME. THE TRIBUNE’S CRUSADE LED TO BLACK ENFRANCHISEMENT, THE CREATION OF A GROUNDBREAKING STATE CONSTITUTION WITH STRONG EQUAL RIGHTS PROVISIONS, AND THE ELECTION OF MANY BLACK REPRESENTATIVES. THE VISION OF DR. ROUDANEZ, ARTICULATED IN PRINT AND MANIFESTED IN SOCIAL PROTEST, FORGED ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CIVIL RIGHTS CAMPAIGNS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

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Residence and Medical Practice of Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez and Family

2019-11-03T00:39:28+00:00

Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez was a visionary free man of color, doctor, and journalist. Angered by slavery and racial injustice, he took up the cause of equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and founded two of New Orleans’ premier black newspapers, L’Union and the New Orleans Tribune.

Like many free people of color in New Orleans, Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez was wealthy, grew up with the French language, attended Catholic Church, and received much of his education in Paris. Roudanez’s parents were racially mixed refugees from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), leaving after the island’s successful slave rebellion began in 1791. [1]

Roudanez was inspired by the 1848 French Revolution, after which the Second Republic abolished slavery and extended the vote to men of color. While in France studying at the faculté de médecine de la Sorbonne, Roudanez was a student of prominent republican activists and reportedly took to the barricaded streets of revolutionary Paris. [2] Dr. Roudanez graduated with honors from the faculté de médecine, widely believed to be the best medical school in the world. He returned to the United States and received a second medical degree from Dartmouth College in 1856.

Returning to New Orleans after his many years of study, Dr. Roudanez found the city had changed significantly. The South’s largest metropolis had an expanding white majority and was becoming more Americanized. Free people of color, while enjoying some measure of liberty, were increasingly denied “privileges” of citizenship, inter-racial marriage, public accommodation and education. Upon his homecoming, the doctor encountered a much more severely restricted and antagonistic racial environment, one which undoubtedly angered a spirit steeped in the values of liberté, egalité et fraternité. [3]

In 1857, Roudanez married Célie Saulay, a free woman of color, at a ceremony held in St. Louis Cathedral. The couple raised eight children together, all likely born at the Roudanez residence. The doctor established a successful medical practice, serving clients without regard to race or ability to pay.

In 1862, Dr. Roudanez, along with Paul Trévigne and Jean Baptiste Roudanez, founded L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper. In 1864, Roudanez launched La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans (the New Orleans Tribune), the first black daily newspaper in the United States. With his Tribune colleagues and a dynamic community of free and freed persons of African descent, Dr. Roudanez courageously attacked racism in the face of some of the nation’s worst violence. He was the group’s guiding force and undoubtedly wrote for the paper as well. Tribune editor Houzeau wrote that “Dr. Roudanez…steadfastly demanded and claimed his rights to their fullest extent with a strength of soul that I always admired.” [4] Roudanez was a brilliant rhetorician who crafted stirring essays. “The time has come for all true radicals to make equality a practical thing in Louisiana,” he wrote. “Let them have the will; let them be well awaked to the importance and the character of that reform; let them above all, insist upon it, on every occasion and at any time.” [5] In 1879, soon after the fall of Reconstruction and mounting racial discrimination in New Orleans, Dr. Roudanez’s wife, daughters, and youngest son permanently relocated to Paris, France. Dr. Roudanez remained in New Orleans for the rest of his life alongside his eldest sons.

Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez is entombed in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

The Roudanez family home was torn down sometime around in the 1920s. Today a parking lot stands in its place.

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Mechanics' Institute Massacre

2019-11-03T00:29:48+00:00

On July 30, 1866, black Republicans attempted to reconvene the Louisiana constitutional convention in an effort to secure voting rights. Held at the Mechanics' Institute, a large crowd of black spectators was present as well. The gathering was attacked by an angry white mob that included police and firemen. [1] According to the Tribune, "black men were assassinated by scores. They fell inside of the hall, outside of the building, in the neighboring streets, and even in distant parts of the city, where they were tracked like dogs." [2] Tribune editor Jean-Charles Houzeau witnessed the bloodbath and heard the assassins shout "To the Tribune!" He claimed the newspaper was saved by a detail of black soldiers. [3]

Louisiana was clearly incapable of reconstructing itself. The horror in New Orleans became an enormous national news story, tipping the fall congressional elections heavily in favor of Radical Republicans and significantly damaging President Johnson's policies of accommodation with ex-Confederates. The new Republican controlled Congress wasted no time in passing four aggressive Reconstruction Acts. Louisiana was to be treated like a conquered enemy, and for the state to be readmitted to the Union, it had to create a new state constitution with strong equal rights provisions.

In late 1867 and early 1868, the constitutional convention in Louisiana drafted and enacted the most sweeping and radical state constitution in the American South. This historic body was composed of an almost equal number of black and white delegates. Many of the Tribune platforms were realized in the new charter, including black men’s right vote. The new state legislature included many black representatives. They would go on to enact the most far reaching and progressive legislation in the American South, including, unique to the entire south, an integrated public school system that was in place in New Orleans from 1872 to 1877. [4]

Harper's Weekly devoted an entire issue to the massacre, including the grim full page graphic illustration "Timely Warning to Union Men. The New Orleans Convention or Massacre," which appeared on September 8, 1866.

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New Orleans Tribune Offices After November 1866: Growing Readership in the Reconstruction Era

2019-10-30T22:06:27+00:00

In November 1866, the Tribune moved from its offices on Conti Street to 122-124 Exchange Alley. These new digs were in the shadow of the St. Louis Hotel (site now occupied by the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel). The St. Louis Hotel housed a large antebellum slave exchange. As free men of color, the men of the Tribune had witnessed the horror and degradation of the city's many slave pens and auction blocks, where over the years over 100,000 souls were stored, assigned a price, and sold as living property.

The Tribune grew and by 1866 claimed a daily circulation of 3,000. Readership was largely in the Afro-Creole community of New Orleans, but the newspaper made a point of its distribution to newly freed people, with whom it recognized the necessity of being “united in a common thought: the actual liberation from social and political bondage.” [1] The paper was read throughout Louisiana and the Gulf South. The journal claimed a wide following in the Union Army. Members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives received every issue, and Radical Republicans in Congress corresponded frequently. Over 15 Northern newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Enquirer, reprinted news from the Tribune, greatly expanding its reach. [2] News from correspondents in many cities, including Boston, Paris, and Mexico City, was published regularly. The words of Victor Hugo and Guiseppe Garibaldi appeared within its pages, and the paper circulated among republican intellectuals in Europe. [3] It was regarded with great interest by Northern abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, who wrote to Tribune publisher Jean Baptiste Roudanez, “I read it with very great pleasure. I am proud that a press so true and wise is devoted to the interests of liberty and equality.” [4] The Tribune kept all these audiences informed about the treatment of black Louisianans, bearing witness to their struggle as Reconstruction unfolded.

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The Lyle Saxon House

2015-11-12T21:55:01+00:00

In 1891, Lyle Saxon was born in Baton Rouge and, after attending Louisiana State University, moved to New Orleans to become a newspaper reporter. He played a pivotal role in the French Quarter Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.

When Saxon moved to New Orleans in the 1920s, the French Quarter was dilapidated and viewed as a dangerous area. Saxon restored a number of houses in the area and encouraged his friends to do the same. He also used the Times-Picayune to champion the renovation of the French Quarter. His friends credit him with playing a major role in transforming the French Quarter into “more art colony, less an underworld.” Saxon began his career as a journalist and later gravitated toward a literary career. The latter part of his career was devoted primarily to work as the head of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project in Louisiana. Saxon was named the state director of the project in 1935, and was well known and well-liked among his peers. A great host and a gifted storyteller, he entertained at his three homes in the French Quarter, his apartment in Greenwich Village, his quarters on Melrose Plantation, and his suite at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans. In 1937, Saxon bought the home at 534 Madison Street with the money he had earned from The Buccaneer, a film adapted from his novel Lafitte the Pirate. In the 1920s, Saxon had restored properties at 612 Royal Street and 536 Royal Street. He planned to make the property at 534 Madison his last restoration project before retiring there.

In the mid-18^th century, Spanish soldiers occupied the property as they oversaw New Orleans’ transition from French to Spanish rule, and it was later converted into a slave hospital. The building that stands on the property today is an important two-story U-shaped porte-cochere building, constructed circa 1830 for Jules Baloc.

Baloc was attacked by a “mulatto” in the house and rescued by his slave, Baptiste. Before Baloc died from his injuries he left his fortune including a large number of slaves, to his wife. He freed Baptiste. The courtyard is framed by the main building and two wings which extend perpendicularly from the main building. The right wing has an attic story, and there are arcades on the first and second floors of one of the wings. The ground floor openings of the main building, however, have been greatly altered over the years. According to Saxon, the house, with its elaborate courtyard, was “so peaceful and quiet … [that] I wanted to stay on, with Joe [Gilmore] to take care of me, and dream the rest of my life away, while I listened to the chiming of the Cathedral clock.” However, the Madison Street house meant “to keep him in his old age” did nothing but “ruin his middle years.” Not only did Saxon pour a great deal of money into the restoration project in the late 1930s, just as he planned to move from St. Charles Hotel, but his health began to fail and his duties at the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Project became increasingly demanding of his time.

Instead of moving permanently to the Madison Street home, Saxon continued to reside at his suite at the St. Charles Hotel, near his office. Saxon eventually sold the Madison Street home in 1945, but not before his close friend, John Steinbeck, married Gwyn Conger in the courtyard in 1943.

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