This is the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of African American History focused on the African American experience in the history of New Orleans, on the occasion of the city\u27s tricentennial

Atkinson, Connie Zeanah

Mitchell, Mary Niall

English

University of New Orleans

University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO History Faculty Publications Department of History and Philosophy 2018 New Orleans at 300: Documenting the African American Experience, 1718–2018. Mary Niall Mitchell University of New Orleans, mnmitche@uno.edu Connie Zeanah Atkinson University of New Orleans, catkinso@uno.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/hist_facpubs  Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Mitchell, Mary Niall, and Connie Zeanah Atkinson. 2018. “INTRODUCTION: New Orleans at 300: Documenting the African American Experience, 1718–2018.” Journal of African American History 103 (4): 491–95. doi:10.1086/699949. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History and Philosophy at ScholarWorks@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact scholarworks@uno.edu. I N T R ODU C T I O NNew Orleans at 300: Documentingthe African American Experience, 1718–2018Mary Niall Mitchell and Connie Zeanah AtkinsonThe city of New Orleans held its Tricentennial celebration beginning in early2018. The mayor’s Tricentennial commission organized and sponsored numer-ous events—from tall ships docking in the port of New Orleans and museumexhibitions attended by King Felipe IV and Queen Lutizia of Spain to food fes-tivals and a citywide scholarly symposium on “Making New Orleans Home.”While the overall tone of many of these official events has been one of celebra-tion, the Tricentennial has also been an opportunity for a reckoning with thecity’s past, including its roots in slavery and the slave trade and its long historyof African American resistance to racial oppression and legalized discrimina-tion. Scholars, activists, and various cultural groups have insisted that these crit-ical chapters of the city’s history should become shared knowledge for the res-idents of New Orleans as well as visitors.The most prominent example of this reckoning was the removal of four Con-federate monuments from prominent spaces in the city in 2017. Mayor MitchLandrieu received national recognition for the removals and explicitly linkedthem to the city’s Tricentennial out of concern for how the city would be per-Mary Niall Mitchell is Ethel and Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair and Joseph Tregle Professor ofEarly American History and Connie Zeanah Atkinson is Joseph Logsdon Professor of History atthe University of New Orleans and co-directors of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies atthe University of New Orleans.The Journal of African American History (Fall 2018) ©2018 a salh. 1548-1867/2018/10304-0001$10.00 All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1086/699949ceived by the world in 2018.1 Yet the removal of those symbols of white suprem-acy had been the objective of African American organizers for decades. On itswebsite, the group Take ’Em Down NOLA made it clear that Mayor Landrieuwould not have succeeded without the many years of protest work by its mem-bers: “The removal of four prominent Confederate and white supremacist mon-uments in New Orleans this summer resulted from years of community orga-nizing, change that local politicians would never have initiated or stuck behindwithout sustained pressure from the grassroots.”2Groups such as Take ’Em Down NOLA demonstrate what historian LeslieHarris, a New Orleans native, recently described as the city’s “enormous capac-ity for change.” Harris was the closing speaker at a three-day citywide sym-posium sponsored by the Tricentennial commission, “Making New OrleansHome,” which also featured conversations with local civil rights activists suchas A. P. Tureaud Jr., Dodie Smith Simmons, and Raphael Cassimere. Harris isclear-eyed about the city’s long history of discrimination and its failure to sup-port its African American residents. While she stressed that the city remains bur-dened by racial inequality with a class system shaped by slavery and its legacies,Harris also insisted that black New Orleanians “are rooted in the history of enor-mous resilience.”3It is to this history of resilience that we pay tribute in this Special Issue of theThe Journal of African American History. As co-directors of the Ethel & Herman L.Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, we are especially invested in telling sto-ries of African American agency and protest. The Midlo Center’s core mission isto share and promote the history of civil rights, broadly defined, in NewOrleans.Herman Midlo was a successful civil rights attorney in New Orleans, and undersegregation he was one of the few lawyers who would represent African Amer-ican clients in the city. His daughter, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, is a leading histo-rian of colonial slavery in eighteenth-century Louisiana, whose work highlightsthe struggles of enslaved people and the importance of African people and theirculture to the development of this region. As Midlo Hall wrote recently, “Amnesiaabout black history cuts us off from the past and undermines our self-image andour confidence that we can bring about important, constructive change in theworld.” Through her own activism in the integrated New Orleans Youth Congress1. Eileen Fleming, “Landrieu Wants Review of City’s Historical Monuments,” WWNO NewOrleans Public Radio, 24 June 2015, http://www.wwno.org/post/landrieu-wants-review-citys-historical-monuments; Katherine Sayre, “Confederate Monuments: Mayor Landrieu Envisions‘Tricentennial Circle’ to Replace Lee,” Nola.com, 28 April 2017, https://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/04/lee_circle_tricentennial_circl.html2. See http://takeemdownnola.org/.3. Leslie M. Harris, “The Future of a Great American City,” remarks delivered at “MakingNew Orleans Home: A Tricentennial Symposium,” 11 May 2018, University of New Orleans.The Journal of African American History492in the late 1940s, and with the inspiration of scholars such as Herbert Aptheker,she “came to understand the power of history to change consciousness and in-spire the struggle for equality.”4The articles that follow, taken collectively, present black New Orleanians’long history of activism, a history that often placed them in the vanguard of na-tional struggles against racial oppression and inequality. William Horne’s essayon musician and Republican politician Victor-Eugene Macarty illustrates throughoneman’s career the struggles of formerly free people of color to secure civil rightsfor African Americans in the Reconstruction era and its aftermath in New Or-leans. Macarty’s life “illustrates the outer limits of equality following emancipa-tion” and the persistence of New Orleans’s Afro-Creole activists even in the faceof unfettered white supremacy in the late nineteenth century.Public schools were another key focus of civil rights struggles, and here NewOrleans was without question in the vanguard within the American South. Wal-ter Stern’s contribution underscores the role that public schools have long playedin New Orleans, from the early nineteenth century forward, as a battlegroundover the rights of black residents to equal treatment and equal opportunity underthe law. Stern traces the fate of the Bayou Road School, an institution that be-came the focal point for struggles over equal access to schooling for African Amer-ican children for generations. In New Orleans, long before Ruby Bridges’s fa-mous walk into William Franz Elementary on 14 November 1960, “race andeducation fueled and inflamed the politics of white supremacy,” and black fam-ilies and community leaders fought to secure the best possible conditions in whichtheir children could attend school.The long view of what began as the Bayou Road School and became JosephClark High School is given a personal perspective in this issue, as well, with theremembrances of Raphael Cassimere, who attended Clark between 1956 and1959. Now emeritus professor in history at the University of New Orleans, Cas-simere explains how influential educators at Clark instilled in their students acommitment to academic excellence and social justice that inspired many ofthem—among them A. P. Tureaud Jr., Oretha Castle Haley, and Johnny Jack-son Jr.—in local civil rights protests in the 1950s and 1960s.Hospitals, too, were important institutions and vital physical spaces throughwhich black New Orleanians sought equal access and treatment as well as im-proved health care. At the center of Kevin McQueeney’s essay is the Flint Good-rich Hospital, a health-care center that served African Americans in the citybetween 1894 and 1985 despite multiple obstacles, both “intentional” and “unin-4. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Southern Negro Youth Congress: A Participant Recalls ItsPast,” http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/southern-negro-youth-congress-participant-recalls-its-past. This article is an excerpt from Midlo Hall’s forthcoming memoir.Introduction 493tentional,” and the debilitating effects of US apartheid and its aftermath. Thestory of Flint-Goodrich highlights the relationship between health care and com-munity and the tragedy of a “two-tiered” system and illuminates the role ofhospitals as “driving engines of twentieth-century urban life, affecting education,labor, and land usage” (582).Finally, Lynnell Thomas looks at activist storytelling and the need to ad-dress the silencing of African American history by the local tourist industry.She compares two very different campaigns to present and interpret New Or-leans history, with a special focus on the notable career of Leon Waters, whofor decades has pressed for more accurate and just interpretations of the city’sFrench Quarter through his Hidden History Tours. In Thomas’s view, the FrenchQuarter “has never been a neutral ground in New Orleans, but it continues to bean important site to wage the battle over public memory and spatial (in)justice”(636). The work of Leon Waters and other reinterpreters of the city’s FrenchQuarter has borne fruit in recent years, as historians, institutions, the commu-nity, and visitors have all pressed for African American public history based onscholarship rather than myth.In that spirit, we have included here a group of essays in tribute to John W.Blassingame and his foundational history Black New Orleans: 1860–1880, firstpublished in 1972. These essays are adapted from remarks given by panelists atthe Organization of American Historians annual meeting in New Orleans on7 April 2017 during a tribute to Blassingame, who was honored as one of themost significant chronicler of the city’s history. The reflections of the panel-ists—Lawrence N. Powell, Jessica Johnson, Erin Greenwald, and Leslie Harris—demonstrate both the importance of Blassingame’s study (at a time when manyhistorians dismissed the city as “unrepresentative” of the South as a whole) andthe significance of New Orleans to past and present struggles for racial justicein the United States.5 The distinctive cultural creativity of Black New Orleans isrevealed in recent scholarly works reviewed in this Special Issue. The skills thatfree and enslaved Africans brought with them to “Slavery’sMetropolis” from theearly eighteenth century are examined. The unfair treatment of Black NewOrleanians by the judicial system in the post-emancipation period is documentedthrough court records and newspapers accounts, as well as the racialized re-sponse to the yellow fever epidemic that hit the city in 1879. “NewOrleans Jazz”inside and outside the United States is explored, along with the African culturalretentions from the Kongo region in the traditions and musical practices of theMardi Gras Indians. The unique culture of the “second line” of the NewOrleanssocial, aid and pleasure clubs has been documented by photographer Eric Wa-5. For a video of Blassingame’s “Black New Orleans” event, held 7 April 2017 at the Ashé Cul-tural Center’s Powerhouse Theater, see https://youtu.be/QWCvnYXneGU.The Journal of African American History494ters in his recent book Freedom’s Dance; and what we know and don’t knowabout the practice of voodoo among Black New Orleanians also comes underscrutiny. African Americans’ campaigns for equal rights and equal treatmentin the nineteenth century continued in twentieth-century New Orleans, andthe changing objectives and outcomes are assessed by several authors.The most significant campaign for racial justice in New Orleans in recentmemory followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The city’s African Americanpopulation was especially hard hit by the disaster. The city’s resurrectionpost-Katrina became an important chapter in black New Orleanians’ long his-tory of struggle, and it continues to shape the political landscape today. One ofthe most effective activists on behalf of black residents in that period was thepresident of the Broadmoor Neighborhood Association, Latoya Cantrell.Broadmoor, which was majority black and low income, was one of the neigh-borhoods designated to become green space rather than to be rebuilt accordingto a controversial plan drafted by Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans BackCommission. Through community activism and the leadership of Cantrell andothers, Broadmoor did come back. This year, New Orleans elected Cantrell, anAfrican American, the city’s first female mayor. The struggle against racial in-justice and disparity in New Orleans continues, and after 300 years, the city’sblack population remains resilient and creative.Introduction 495

New Orleans at 300: Documenting the African American Experience, 1718–2018.

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