Claiborne Avenue, from Treme to the 7th Ward, is a corridor packed to the rafters with memory, resistance and a refusal to be assimilated, dominated and denigrated. It is rockin’ – from one side to the other - with a resounding sense of life and…

Starting in the 1920s and increasing exponentially in the 1930s, and onwards, the urban landscape of New Orleans, like many urban municipalities across the country, began to change as a result of a series of racially restrictive covenants and zoning…

On March 13, 1872, the National Republican reflected upon the importance of the nation’s first Black executive officer, Lieutenant. Governor Oscar James Dunn, some four months after his untimely death writing, “He was to them [Black Americans],…

Human history from the 15th-20th centuries is dominated by Europeans’ unrelenting encroachment on and theft of land and natural resources in the “new world” and the “global south”. Though chicanery was deployed from time to time to accomplish these…

The year was 1865; the Confederacy had just been defeated, and many emancipated African Americans departed the cane and cotton fields for New Orleans. Louisiana planters scrambled to assemble a new labor force, as did railroad investors, and learned…

Mother Catherine Seals is a mysterious figure. There’s not much written about her, and only a few photographs of her exist. So a lot of what we do know about this spiritual mother is hearsay. And some say that once she created her Bethlehem in the…

“Weeds, snakes, and a contaminated lake.” These were the swimming conditions that New Orleans provided for African Americans prior to the opening of Lincoln Beach. In 1938, Sam Zemurray, president of United Fruit Company, deeded a 2.3-acre…

Centrally located in the Seventh Ward, the St. Bernard Market began as a public market, part of an expansive network of public markets across New Orleans, in 1854. It carried everything from produce to livestock, including — as lore has it —…

Juanita Pierre and her partner Leslie Martinez opened Les Pierres, the first Black lesbian owned bar in New Orleans, in the 1980s. Located on the corner of Pauger and Rampart Streets in the Marigny, their Saturday night crowd spilled out of the…

"Ten thousand Micks/They Swung their picks/To dig th’ New Canawl, But the choleray was stronger’n they/And twice it killed them awl" And with that ditty, published in the Times-Picayune of July 18, 1937, the lore was born that thousands…

In the last years of the 18th century, enslavers feared that the practice of enslavement would soon end. It could have, if not for the advent of the cotton gin, which created immense demand for enslaved labor. America purchased Louisiana, the…

On March 15, 1891, a lynch mob of thousands descended upon the city jail. The destruction and terror caused by this well-orchestrated mob reverberated well past this day, affecting local and global politics in the decades to come. Armed with guns,…

In late 1865, Robert Charles was born a free man in Copiah County, southwest Mississippi. It was not long after the Union Army had dealt the treasonous insurrection its final defeat on the battlefield at Appomattox. Charles’ parents would have…

In August of 1948, a young man from Lafayette, Louisiana named Norman C. Francis moved to New Orleans to further his education at Xavier University. While at Xavier he remained grounded in the life lessons his parents taught him as a young boy,…

In the late summer of 1963, propelled through treacherous rural Alabama by spirituals from his previous post in the civil rights battlefields of south Georgia, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary and playwright John…

Born June 29, 1910 in Terrebonne Parish, Avery Caesar Alexander grew up in a poor family. He entered the workforce as a boy, taking odd jobs until he earned work as a longshoreman. His family relocated to New Orleans and because he was forced to…

On December 1, 1927, an overall-clad longshoreman interrupted a Sunday evening gathering of the New Orleans Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association: Marcus Garvey, the organization’s founder, was to be deported to Jamaica through the…

John Thompson had a sharp wit and irreverent humor. John Thompson was a proud New Orleanian who cursed the dysfunction of his city every day. John Thompson loved his wife, his family, and his friends. John Thompson was an exoneree, a death-penalty…

Rosa Freeman was born into a wealthy New Orleans family in 1911. In 1932, she married Charles Keller Jr., and seemed destined to follow the conventional path of a young society matron. But around the time of World War II, she started becoming…

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini arrived in New Orleans in 1892, with a charge to help poor Italian immigrants at a time of intense xenophobia in the city. A year earlier, a local lynch mob had murdered 11 Sicilian immigrants. Yellow fever had also…