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Passing Gentilly Boulevard on the Bus to UNO in 1958
Gentilly Boulevard crosses the Elysian Fields bus route at the next traffic light after passing under Interstate-610. When the bus passed this stop on that Monday morning in 1958, it suddenly became a…
Hostility Towards Black Students During the First Day of Classes at UNO
Just after Robert E. Lee Boulevard, the bus will turn left into the Lakefront Campus of the University of New Orleans (the university was renamed in 1974), where the battle for acceptance began one…
Recollections from 'The 55' on Segregation and Harassment at UNO
Facing the bus, turn right and walk around the back of the bus stop to explore the campus, as you learn more about the rough road to integration. The giant statue of King Lear in front of the…
UNO Administrators and Integration
Head back toward the bus stop, passing the amphitheater on your right and the administration building on your left. The administration building is a rather nondescript edifice, reflective of the role…
Louise Williams Arnolie Deck at the University Center
Enter the University Center at the top of the horseshoe driveway. To your left is the university cafeteria, renamed in 2014 for Louise Williams Arnolie, one of the original 55 African-American…
White Supremacist Presence During Integration of UNO
Looking north from the library commons towards Lake Pontchartrain, you can spy the old brick smokestack near the edge of the campus. The smokestack is the only original structure remaining from the…
Krewe of Carrollton
In 1924, Oak Street merchants formed the Seventh District Carnival Club, which became the Krewe of Carrollton. The krewe’s original parade route was around the Carrollton neighborhood, centering upon…
Algiers Immigrant Quarantine Detention Center
Treatment and quarantine of newly arrived immigrants at ports around New Orleans were based on discriminatory ideologies and lead to the mistreatment of many people who arrived in this region from…
Maple Leaf Reading Series
The Maple Leaf reading series is the longest-running poetry reading series in New Orleans as well as the South. In 1979, famed local poet Everette Maddox began the series with sculptor Franz Heldner…
Poet Everette Maddox's "American Waste"
After a long dry spell beginning in the early 1980s, poet Everette Maddox began writing again in 1988. The poems began to pour out of him, seeming to bubble up after the seven years in which he did…
Poet Everette Maddox
The ashes of poet Everette Maddox are buried on the patio at the Maple Leaf Bar, which, in the last years of his life, he made his home. It was here that he founded the readings series, now known as…
Maple Street Bookshop
In 1965, sisters Rhoda Norman and Mary Kellogg opened the Maple Street Bookshop, the first in New Orleans to specialize in paperback books. As Tess Crager's Basement Bookshop had been in the 1930s and…
Basement Bookshop and Library
In the 1930s and 1940s, the center of New Orleans literary life resided at 7221 Zimple Street, the Basement Bookshop and Library. Tess Crager opened the store in a little yellow wood-frame building…
Mater Dolorosa School
Originally located on the corner of Cambronne and Freret Streets, Mater Dolorosa School was founded in 1872 in order to provide quality education to the children of the Mater Dolorosa congregation.…
The Tio Family's Resilience
The Tio family is best known as a prominent contributor to early jazz of the 20th century, notably the addition of a “Mexican Tinge” to the genre. However, the Tios were, in fact, native New…
Sit-In at McCrory's: September 17, 1960
Paper Monument Project #004: In September 1960, the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, staged two high-profile sit-ins in an attempt to desegregate Canal Street lunch…
Saint Katharine Drexel and Xavier University
Katharine Mary Drexel, born on November 26, 1858, into one of the wealthiest families in Philadelphia was destined to be a socialite and a member of privileged society. He father, Francis A. Drexel…
The Tango Belt
This entertainment district in the Upper French Quarter was a center of music and theater performance in the 1920s for both black and white patrons.
The Lyric Theatre
New Orleans' largest African American vaudeville theater in the 1920s hosted many jazz, blues and vaudeville stars, and featured the John Robichaux Orchestra.
Danny Barker’s Birthplace
Musician, educator, author and storyteller Danny Barker was born in 1909 in the rear building at 1027 Chartres Street. At the time of Barker's birth, the lower French Quarter community was home to a…
Saenger Theater
The Saenger Theatre witnessed and mediated the rise and fall of several different forms of entertainment, including vaudeville, jazz and orchestral music, and motion pictures in its first decades on…
St. Louis Hotel & Exchange: Auctioning Off Lives
Numerous 19th-century travelers who frequented New Orleans for business and pleasure described the slave auction block in St. Louis Hotel. Sensationalism aside, visitors recorded their surprise at the…
The Story of Fanny: Escaping Bondage in New Orleans
There were times when enslaved people in New Orleans could no longer bear the intense burden that came with the constant suffering of bondage. Escape became the last hope for some of these slaves…
“Confined in the Dungeons”: Orleans Parish Prison and Self-Emancipated People
Located in Treme, the original Orleans Parish Prison stood where the Municipal Auditorium and Louis Armstrong Park stand today. From the 1830s to 1895, the prison housed individuals accused of crimes,…