Stories tagged "Monuments and Memorials": 27
Stories
The Elephant in the Room: Burial Site of Enslaved People and Contested Jurisdiction at McDonoghville Cemetery
McDonoghville Cemetery is a burial site of enslaved and formerly enslaved people. This cemetery was once a part of enslaver John McDonogh’s plantation. According to a 1915 interview with Jacob Dinckel, then sexton of the McDonoghville Cemetery, this…
Fort Pike
In 1819, President James Monroe commissioned Fort Pike’s construction alongside six other forts on the Louisiana coast. [2] Originally known as Fort Petites Coquilles, Monroe commissioned the fort with the intention of protecting the city of New…
African Presence in Algiers
On December 31, 2019, the Algiers Tricentennial Committee and the Algiers community of New Orleans dedicated this historic Middle Passage marker at what is now the Algiers Courthouse honoring those who perished and those who survived the…
Oscar James Dunn
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],…
The Morales-Arlington Tomb: A Fiery Legacy
The Morales-Arlington’s tomb once held one of New Orleans most notorious madams, Josie Arlington, from the city’s equally notorious red light district, Storyville. Arlington's reputation and the tomb she created for herself have attracted…
Joan of Arc Statue
In 1425, at the young age of thirteen, voices spoke to a French teenager named Joan telling her to provide aid to Charles VII of France in his plight against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Mounted on her steed, this teenage girl led the…
Monument to the Immigrant
The “Monument to the Immigrant” was erected in March 1995 and stands along the Mississippi River in Woldenberg Park. The monument depicts an immigrant family on one side and the other side a stylized figure shaped like the front of a ship, reminding…
Les Pierres
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…
Irish Canal Workers: Defying Odds and Defying Expectations
"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…
Dr. Norman C. Francis
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,…
Free Southern Theater
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…
City Hall Cafeteria Sit-In
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…
Farewell to the Honorable Marcus Garvey
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: Resurrection After Exoneration
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…
Madre Francesca Cabrini
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…
Dew Drop Inn
The Dew Drop Inn "opened" its doors in 1939 under the ownership of Mr. Frank Pania. The Dew Drop would become a major player in the development of Rhythm and Blues.
The "Drop," as it was called, became the hub of social and…
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
Each year, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in New Orleans includes a stop on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard where a commemorative statue was erected in 1976. Artist Frank Hayden, a former student at Xavier University and professor at…
Robert E. Lee Monument
The Lee Monument stood at the center of what is today called “Lee Circle” a busy traffic roundabout for streetcars and automobiles. In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre of 2015, all symbols associated with the Confederacy faced renewed…
Jefferson Davis Monument
Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, died in New Orleans, Louisiana on December 6, 1889. Residents hung black bunting from buildings along St. Charles Avenue, and the city itself entered a period of…
Lafayette Square
Lafayette Square is located in what is now known as the Central Business District. Previously home Bertrand Gravier's plantation, the land was divided in 1788 to create Faubourg Ste. Marie, New Orleans’ first suburb. Lafayette Square is the…