American Experience (1988) s19e09 Episode Script

1
NARRATOR: On August 29, 2005,
a catastrophic hurricane
named Katrina
made landfall on the Gulf Coast
of the United States.
When the skies finally cleared,
the survival of a major American
city hung in the balance.
For more than 200 years,
that city had been
an iconic feature
on the national landscape,
a vital port,
a cosmopolitan mecca,
a sensual, mysterious refuge.
Now, the storm had laid it waste
and raised a stark and
previously unthinkable question:
What exactly would America
be without New Orleans?
(jazz music playing)
JOHN BIGUENET:
We tend to look to New Orleans
as a place where the past
continues to live.
But I think much more important
for the United States
is this is the place
where the future is visible.
For one thing, it's the cultural
cradle of this country.
I don't care what New York says.
This whole country was founded
on the principle
of the so-called melting pot
and the blending of cultures.
We've shown America
how to do it.
IRVIN MAYFIELD: The Constitution
resides somewhere else,
but the constitution of music
resides here.
The constitution of food
resides here.
TOM PIAZZA: You do learn very
quickly with New Orleans
that if you're going to love it,
you have to love it
with its flaws.
It suffers from terrible
poverty, terrible crime.
But if you love something,
you love it for what it is,
not for what you wish
it would be.
ARI KELMAN: New Orleans is
such an alluring place.
The city really has become
kind of embedded
in the American imagination
as something
that's wholly different
from the rest of this country,
but at the same time
representative
of some of the best
of what we are
and some of the worst
of what we are.
(boat horn sounds)
MAYFIELD: New Orleans is a very old
city, with a lot of tradition,
a lot of culture that is born
out of ceremony.
You can find history anywhere,
but in New Orleans,
it's kind of like
we're always living the history,
the history is being lived
on a daily basis.
People don't tell history,
they do history.
JOHN SCOTT: There is so much
cultural richness in that city
that it oozes up
out of the sidewalk.
You know, it's hard to be there,
really be there,
and not begin to absorb that.
Of all the places
I've been in the world,
New Orleans is the only place
I've ever been
where, if you listen,
sidewalks will speak to you.
(insects chittering)
NARRATOR: When wealthy travelers
set out to see America
in the 19th century,
only a handful of cities were
considered essential stops
on the itinerary,
and of those, none inspired more
fascination than New Orleans.
"On arriving in the morning,"
one visitor remarked in 1819,
"New Orleans has a very imposing
and handsome appearance.
"Everything has an odd look,
"and I confess
that it was impossible
"not to stare
at a sight wholly new
even to one who has traveled
much in Europe and America."
Situated at a crescent-shaped
bend in the Mississippi,
about 100 miles from its mouth,
New Orleans was perched atop
the river's natural levee
A ribbon of high ground
that sloped gently down
from the water's edge
for a mile or two,
then gave way to dense,
mosquito-infested cypress swamp.
Beyond the swamp to the north
was Lake Pontchartrain,
which led to the Gulf Mexico.
New Orleans was a city
surrounded by water.
PEIRCE LEWIS: If you think
about North America,
the whole interior is drained
by one of two river systems.
One is the St. Lawrence,
by way of the Great Lakes,
and the other is the
Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri.
And the way to control
the Mississippi and, by the way,
nearly the whole interior
of North America,
was New Orleans.
There had to be a city there,
even though the site, uh,
was, uh, was dicey.
KELMAN: On the one hand, it's the
worst place imaginable to put a city.
A good portion of the city
is below sea level,
in some cases, as much as ten
or 15 feet below sea level.
It's a terrible
disease environment.
They've had horrible epidemics
throughout their history.
And of course, they're on the
path for these Gulf storms
as they come up
out of the Atlantic.
On the other hand, though,
it's the best place imaginable
to put a city,
maybe the best place
that you can imagine
in the world to put a city.
NARRATOR:
New Orleans had been founded
as the capital of French
Louisiana back in 1718,
ceded to Spain and governed by
her for nearly half a century,
then briefly reclaimed
by France,
all before finally being sold
to the United States
as part of
the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
To that point, most of
the native-born inhabitants
of New Orleans had been
French-speaking Roman Catholics
who called themselves Creoles.
Unlike the Cajuns,
the French-Canadian immigrants
who had settled
in the Louisiana countryside,
the Creoles were primarily
urban people,
proudly Parisian in their
manners and attitudes,
and passionately devoted to
the cultured enjoyment of life.
In the crowded colonial city,
called the Vieux Carré
Or old square whites had lived
side by side with blacks,
among them Africans
and people of mixed race
known variously as mulattoes,
quadroons and octoroons.
Some of them were slaves;
Others the so-called
"free people of color,"
many of them refugees
from a bloody slave revolt
in the former French colony
of Haiti.
Entitled to own property and
operate their own businesses,
the free people of color
were by far
the most prosperous black
community in the United States.
KELMAN: The free people of color have
their own cultural institutions,
they have their own community.
But at the same time
they interact quite easily
with the white power structure
of the city.
The kinds of clear separation
that exist
in other places
in the United States
just aren't present
in New Orleans.
RAPHAEL CASSIMERE: The amalgamation
of the Africans and whites
created basically one culture
where everybody was accepted.
It worked well
because people kind of
understood class structure.
I mean, even though you lived
next door to somebody
didn't necessarily mean that
you were socially their equal.
But free blacks as well as
slaves had a place in society.
(steam whistle blows)
NARRATOR: Into this century-old
city of some 7,000 people
had come the Americans
English-speaking, Protestant
and accustomed to a rigid line
between black and white.
They had come pouring south
from the eastern seaboard
and the Kentucky hill country,
most of them bent
on making money
and doing so
in the American way.
We came in and we wanted
to impose our ways
on an alternative
European civilization.
We wanted to impose
the English language.
We wanted to get rid
of the local culture.
So there was this struggle
for the soul of New Orleans.
NARRATOR: By 1820, the Americans'
commercial connections
had made New Orleans
a bustling entrepot
for bananas and coffee
from Latin America;
Cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco
from the plantations
of the South;
Tens of thousands of slaves
from Virginia.
KALAMU YA SALAAM: New Orleans was the
major international port in the South.
It was the entry point
for much of the traffic
coming from Europe.
It was the easiest way
to export grain
and heavy manufactured goods,
most of which were coming
out of the Midwest,
and all of them end up
passing New Orleans.
NARRATOR: "In a few years,"
one observer concluded,
"this will be an American town
and everything French
will in time disappear."
It was a prediction
that never quite came true.
BIGUENET: The Americans were
not given very serious regard.
Um that prejudice
persisted so long
that my grandfather, I mean,
200 years
after the Louisiana Purchase
still called tourists
"the Americans."
Uh, "the Americans came
every summer," he said.
NARRATOR: The Creoles' refusal
to assimilate was so staunch
that in the end, it would be
etched into the map
of the growing city.
Decades after
the Americans' arrival,
the Vieux Carré remained
the nearly exclusive territory
of the Creoles.
The newcomers were settled
farther upriver
with their own business district
called the American sector
and a neighborhood
of stately homes
that would come to be known
as the Garden District.
Street names changed
as they crossed Canal,
the so-called neutral ground
between the French city
and the American one.
And what was Chartres
on one side
became Camp on the other.
Each side had its own opera
house and its own churches,
its own shipping canals,
reservoirs and levees.
And each had
its own ruling class:
A small, select elite comprised
of those who were
both wealthy and white.
(steamboat whistle blows)
Meanwhile,
as the port prospered,
New Orleans lured immigrants
from all over the world
From France and the French
colonies in the West Indies,
from China and the Philippines,
Ireland, Germany and Sicily.
By the middle
of the 19th century,
New Orleans would be home
to some 100,000 people,
40% of them foreign-born
and more of mixed
racial ancestry
than anywhere else
in the United States.
KELMAN: New Orleans is
a place that never has
a single truly dominant culture.
You've got these French Creoles,
this Creole elite in the city
that doesn't want to lose power.
And you've got
American newcomers
who want power very, very badly.
You've got, again, slaves
and free people of color.
Then you've got people
from all over the world
and they all have to live
sort of cheek by jowl.
And it makes for a very, very
complicated cultural dynamic,
and in some cases, a very
exciting cultural dynamic,
but one that also can be
very, very explosive.
NARRATOR:
Over the century to come,
the many and varied peoples
of New Orleans
would struggle to live together,
contending with one another
to sink roots in unstable soil.
Along the way, they would
make their city
the site of a radical experiment
in American democracy,
one that would test
whether diversity would prove
a dangerous liability
or a vital, creative force.
MAN:
The cemetery is a connection
for the living to their past.
It's like a touchstone.
It has nothing
to do with the dead,
it has to do with the living.
You know, there is a tradition
in New Orleans
of giving picnics
in the cemetery.
And I don't know
if other people do that,
but it's done in New Orleans
and it's not considered unusual.
You just bring a picnic basket,
you go sit in the cemetery,
and you have a picnic.
Cemeteries are open.
Nobody bothers you.
And you go visit,
whether it's your family
or somebody else's family.
I've been asked
to work on a tomb
that's in poor condition
that we want to bring up
to a condition
where it's weather tight.
This tomb
At least this plaque
Was made by a guy
named Foyville Foy.
He and his brother
were freedmen of color
who had distinguished
themselves as tomb builders.
They took great pride
in their work.
I'm working on this
It's like if I'm working
on a piece of Tiffany jewelry,
except on a larger scale.
This is all about the respect
for this
For these pieces of antiquity.
And that's just the way
I think about it.
(jazz music plays)
I know that when
I'm done with this
there'll be thousands
of people who will come through.
And I've made a statement.
I've given my piece
back to my city.
I feel like I'm assisting
in telling the story
of New Orleans
and keeping it intact.
(jazz music continues)
Every time I walk
past these tombs,
it puts me in the continuum.
I'm continuing a tradition.
And I like being part
of the continuum.
♪
(cheering, band plays)
NARRATOR: It was
mid-afternoon in New Orleans
when the crowd began to gather
at the foot of Canal Street.
The date was
February 25th, 1873,
and the city, like the rest
of the American South,
had yet to emerge from the long
shadow of civil war.
Captured by Union troops
not long after the conflict
began, New Orleans had endured
three years
of military occupation
and a ruinous
interruption of trade
before the Confederates finally
surrendered in 1865.
The years since had been marked
by unrelenting turmoil
and steady economic decline.
And the city was now hovering
on the brink of chaos.
To New Orleanians,
it was an ideal moment
for a party.
(jazzy fanfare plays)
By the time the sun
went down on Canal Street,
thousands of them had turned out
to witness
the procession of Rex,
the self-proclaimed
King of Carnival
and the official leader
of the annual Mardi Gras parade.
(jazz music plays)
SALAAM: It's Fat Tuesday.
It's the last chance to fatten
yourself up before Easter.
And so, it's a religious holiday
with pagan roots
that never caught on
in the rest of the United States
because the rest
of the United States
was Protestant and not Catholic.
POWELL: Carnival was something
that came over from France
and began
as a street celebration
where people would mask and
they'd have dances and balls.
So actually it percolated up
from the streets,
but the Carnival that a lot
of people know today
that's around these krewes,
these parades,
the organized parades,
is something that was
superimposed on Carnival.
GEORGE SCHMIDT:
The Creoles celebrated it.
And they celebrated it so well
that at a point in the mid-19th
century, the Americans,
in their "we can do anything"
attitude, say
They're going to say,
"Well, we're going to take it
and improve it.
We are going to give it
some shape, some order."
So they decide
to put on a procession.
And it was unbelievably popular.
(jazz music plays)
POWELL: If you really begin
to peel away the layers
of meaning and symbolism,
you have a governing group there
that's never really felt
entirely in control.
They've tried to rule,
but this has been a city
too unruly to rule.
The organized parade
is something to kind of assert
their primacy and to say,
"Well, we can be
arbiters of culture."
(band plays, applause)
NARRATOR: The parade rolled on hour
after hour, well into the night,
a river of masked revelers
and extravagant floats,
jugglers and torchbearers
and marching bands.
As New Orleanians liked to say,
it was by far "the greatest
free show on earth."
But for the spectators in 1873,
the most vivid impression would
be left by the last division,
the members of a secret
Carnival society, or krewe,
called Comus after the ancient
god of mirth.
(old musical recording plays)
They emerged out
of the gathering darkness,
all wearing enormous
papier-mâché animal heads
that poked fun
at Charles Darwin's
controversial theory
of evolution
by portraying well-known
public figures
as missing links in the chain.
Benjamin Butler,
the Union general responsible
for the wartime
occupation of New Orleans,
appeared as a hyena.
President Ulysses S. Grant,
a man rarely seen
without his cigar,
a lowly tobacco grub.
But the most pointed lampoon
came late in the evening
during the exclusive Comus ball
with the crowning
of "The Gorilla,"
a caricature of Oscar J. Dunn,
who recently had served
as Louisiana's
lieutenant governor
and had been the first black
person elected to that office
anywhere in the United States.
Harper's Weekly magazine
hailed the Comus pageant
as "irresistibly laughable."
But the spectacle
was hardly all in jest.
JAMES GILL: The intent was to
mock Darwin's theory itself
and also the absurdity
that a black man should be
at the apex of society.
So you have an attack
not just on the Darwin theories,
but on the social disruption
that they feared,
um, it might contribute to,
and which, of course,
they thought was already
happening in their view
during the Reconstruction era.
NARRATOR: To the men behind
the fanciful Comus masks,
members of the secretive
and socially exclusive
Pickwick Club,
there were few words
in the English language
more loathsome
than "reconstruction."
The term referred
to an 1867 act of Congress
that had subjected the states
of the former Confederacy,
including Louisiana,
to federal military rule.
But to the Pickwickians,
it was synonymous with defeat
and humiliation.
Before the Civil War,
the men of the Pickwick Club
had been the elite
of New Orleans.
In their dealings as prominent
businessmen and bankers,
professionals and politicians,
they had had considerable
contact with blacks,
especially
with the free people of color.
But such racial mixing
always had taken place
against the backdrop of an
unquestioned social hierarchy:
Slaves on the bottom rung,
free people of color
in the middle,
whites on top.
Reconstruction
had changed all that.
With Congress dictating
the terms
of Louisiana's readmission
to the Union
and U.S. Army forces on hand
to ensure compliance,
blacks had been given rights
previously unheard of
anywhere in the United States.
First, they had been made voters
and officeholders.
Then, in 1868,
Louisiana had passed its
Reconstruction Constitution,
which granted to all citizens
of the state, black and white,
absolute equality under the law.
POWELL:
The 1868 constitution was,
in racial terms,
the most radical
and progressive constitution
anywhere in America,
and it was pushed by the free
people of color in New Orleans,
who not only were wealthier
and more educated,
but, I think, more
politically sophisticated
and self-confident.
And they said, listen,
equality isn't just legal.
It doesn't mean we have
the right to vote
or the right to sit in juries.
It means we have a right
to equal standing
in the public order.
SALAAM: The constitution reflected
the thinking of black people
who had a stake
in governing their lives
in ways in which in other parts
of the country,
black people
had not yet achieved.
You had blacks who were lawyers,
who were doctors
and what have you;
Who were bi- and trilingual,
and not just people
who were ex-slaves.
So these people have
a different consciousness
and it manifests itself
in political terms.
KELMAN: And of course there's an
entrenched white power structure
that finds that abhorrent,
distasteful,
profoundly threatening;
And those people
do everything in their power
to sort of turn back the clock.
NARRATOR: Inspired by the Ku Klux
Klan, aggrieved Pickwickians
now joined with other whites
in New Orleans and formed
a volunteer militia called
the Crescent City White League.
According to the league's
published platform,
their aim was to put an end
to Reconstruction
and to what they called
"the most absurd inversion
of the relations of race."
On September 14th,
they took action.
That morning, the leaders of the
White League held a mass rally
on Canal Street
and urged the several thousand
men in attendance
to return to their homes,
arm themselves
and seize control
of the state government.
During the tense hours
that followed,
White Leaguers marched
on the Customs House,
where Louisiana's governor
was holed up in an office,
and demanded his resignation.
When he refused to step down,
a force of several hundred
White League members opened fire
on the city's biracial
police force,
leaving 11 dead
and 60 more wounded.
By the end of the day,
the White League was
in full control of New Orleans.
POWELL: Basically, what they
did was launch a coup d'etat.
But President Grant and the
Republicans in Washington said,
"No, this is too much of a
defiance of legitimate order."
NARRATOR: Grant immediately
dispatched federal troops,
and within a week, the
insurrection had been subdued.
But the federal intervention
would only fuel resistance
to Reconstruction.
GILL: You could look at that
as the beginning of the end
of the Reconstruction era,
because the White League
remained strong,
in fact was patrolling
the streets in 1877
when the federals finally
decided to withdraw.
And then once the federals went,
white society was free to undo
what had been done
in Reconstruction.
So in fact, the Confederates
had lost the war,
but of course were about
to win the peace.
KELMAN: New Orleans spends a lot
of time trying to segregate itself
socially and racially, trying
to figure out who's white,
who's black, who's American,
who's Creole.
And that's what happens
with Carnival.
There's all the very, very
complicated racial
and social dynamics
that play out during Carnival.
The different krewes represent
different segments
of the city's socioeconomic
and racial makeup.
People are trying
very, very hard
to identify clearly who they are
by joining
certain krewes at Carnival.
WOMAN: Rex has always been
a part of our family.
Growing up, having a grandfather
who was king
My grandparents, my parents,
my uncles, my aunts,
we've all just been very
They've been very active
in the organization.
WOMAN: You see the queens
and the kings every year
when you watch the parade
and, you know, it's just,
it's just weird to think
that it's me this year.
It's such an honor.
We're going to do
entrance to the ball
but we're not going to be able
to walk the whole way.
Remember, stretch your arm out.
Up. Walk in.
Project to your audience.
Good.
Come on the floor.
Y'all stand for a second.
Good. Look at Rex,
boss him around.
Okay, good.
Go.
MOTHER: It's going to
be a beautiful ball.
It's all gold.
And she's just going to come out
with a big old smile on her face
and just brighten up
the whole room.
Out. Move your hands
all the way around.
End up looking at your pages.
It's just going to be beautiful.
Hey.
Hey, how are you?
Good to see you.
Well, we have
the royal flag here.
Oh, yay!
I'd like to present
this flag to you.
MOTHER: Holy mackerel, I didn't
realize it was this big.
MAN: This is yours.
From the organization.
Are you ready? Judy, I've
never actually done this.
MOTHER: She knows all the cues
and they have their signals,
and she knows when
to change her scepter
from her right hand
to her left hand,
and she knows when to bow.
And, you know, of course
she's a little nervous,
but she's got the stamina
and she's got the poise
that she'll handle it
just beautifully.
Look at her;
Doesn't she look gorgeous?
It is a beautiful shawl.
It really sparkles in the light, too.
Mm-hmm.
You're such a pretty girl.
Aw, thank you.
MOTHER: The minute the monarchs
step out on the floor,
it is just breathtaking.
Truly, it's, um, a play.
They know the cues
and they have their signals.
And it's a beautiful set.
They have fountains going
and the women are all dressed up
all so pretty
and the men are all so handsome,
and it's a big wow for anybody
who's never seen it.
(drums playing intro)
(band begins festive jazz tune)
Rex is the soul of our city.
This is what makes it
so unique and so charming.
We're an old city.
We've got these traditions
that haven't gone away.
Evidently they work.
NARRATOR:
On the first of September, 1891,
18 prominent New Orleanians
assembled
at the French Quarter offices
of The Crusader,
the city's black
weekly newspaper,
to discuss a looming crisis.
14 years had passed
since federal Reconstruction
had come to an end,
and in that time, the once-
buoyant hopes of black Americans
had been swamped
by savage violence.
WOMAN: Ooh, Lordy, my
trouble's so hard ♪
NARRATOR: Over the previous year
alone, more than 100 black southerners
had been lynched,
an average of two each week.
WOMAN: Don't nobody know
my trouble but God ♪
NARRATOR: Racial
discrimination, meanwhile,
had begun to be written
into law.
In Louisiana, the legislature
recently had passed
the Separate Car Act,
requiring railroad companies
to provide separate
accommodations
for white and black passengers,
and similar laws
already were pending
in five other states
across the South.
WOMAN:
trouble's so hard ♪
REBECCA SCOTT: "Equal but
separate," that was the phrase,
and what was happening in that
moment of equal but separate
had to do with much more than
the first-class railway car.
It had to do with the state
of Louisiana saying
to its population of color:
You are different,
you are to be excluded.
NARRATOR: Now, The Crusader's
chief editorial contributor,
Rodolphe Desdunes, had called
upon the elite
in New Orleans' black community
to spearhead the resistance.
"This law is unconstitutional,"
Desdunes argued.
"It is like a slap in the face
of every member
of the black race."
Like most of those present
atthe Crusader meeting,
Desdunes was a so-called "Creole
of color" and hailed from
the community of blacks who had
been free before the Civil War.
Born in 1849 to a Haitian father
and a Cuban mother,
he had grown up
in the Vieux Carré,
where many people of color
were so light-skinned
as to be indistinguishable
from whites;
Where French was spoken
in the streets;
And where the ideals
of the French Revolution
Liberty, fraternity
and equality
Could be easily recited
by any school-aged child.
Too young to have participated
in the equal rights struggles
during Reconstruction, Desdunes
was instead their beneficiary
and had come of age in the most
integrated city in the South.
Here you have people
who had been living free
for years and years
Doctors, lawyers, craftspeople,
et cetera
And all of a sudden, you're
in a society where they had
to have a separate car
for people of color
and a separate car for whites.
They fought against it.
CASSIMERE: These people
believed that it was illegal
to impose racial segregation
in public places.
They were confident
if they got this to court,
the courts were going to rule
that the state does not
have the right
to force passengers
to sit in certain cars.
NARRATOR: Calling themselves
the Citizens Committee,
Desdunes and his fellow
activists began to meet
in secret
at the Crusader's offices,
and over the next several
months, their plan took shape.
A person of color would be sent
to board
a whites-only railroad car.
When the conductor directed him
to the car for blacks,
he would refuse to go.
Once he had been arrested
and charged,
the Citizens Committee
legal team would use his case
to challenge the Separate
Car Act in the courts.
The man selected to act the part
of the passenger
was a fellow New Orleanian,
a shoemaker named Homer Plessy.
By his own accounting,
Plessy was seven-eighths white,
and the African blood, he noted,
was "not discernible."
POWELL: What they wanted to show is:
If you couldn't tell the difference
between a black person
and a white person,
isn't any line
of racial differentiation
by definition
arbitrary and capricious?
I mean, you know, how
If you can't tell the
difference, how can you
how can you make a law saying
that people should be separated?
NARRATOR: In November 1892, in a session
of the Louisiana Criminal Court,
Judge John Howard Ferguson
held Homer Plessy guilty
of violating
the Separate Car Act.
The Citizens Committee
would appeal the ruling
all the way to the Supreme Court
of the United States.
As Desdunes explained to those
who criticized the move
as too aggressive:
"We believe that it is
more noble and worthy to fight
than to show oneself
passive and resigned."
SCOTT: Rodolphe Desdunes was
fighting this one to win it.
But he was also fighting
this one for the record.
So that if anyone claimed
that what forced racial
segregation was
was simply a customary means
of Southern life,
there would be
an indisputable record
that this group of people
had fought it tooth and nail.
NARRATOR: It took more than four
years for Plessy v. Ferguson
to work its way
through the courts.
Meanwhile, the segregation laws
on Louisiana's books multiplied.
Then came the U.S. Supreme Court
ruling on Plessy.
In May 1896,
with only one justice
dissenting,
the Court upheld
the right of states
to segregate people
on the basis of race.
Among those rendering
the majority opinion
was Justice
Edward Douglass White,
member of the New Orleans
Pickwick Club,
formerly Private White,
Company E, Crescent City
White League.
Desdunes and his fellow
activists were crushed.
"Notwithstanding this decision,"
they wrote,
"we, as freemen, still believe
that we were right."
SCOTT: When we think back on this
moment and the lost opportunity,
it is extraordinarily poignant.
I think part of what makes it
so painful is to realize
that when they lost in 1896,
it meant that the entire country
lost an opportunity
to really embody
the new birth of freedom
that the Civil War
had been meant to create.
And it opened up the space
for something very different
to be built.
And once that edifice
of white supremacy was built,
it would be impossible
to dismantle
by normal political means.
NARRATOR: Soon after the decision,
The Crusader ceased publication,
and the Citizens Committee
disbanded.
Over the next several years,
under so-called
Jim Crow statutes,
blacks in New Orleans
and throughout the South
would be deprived
of the right to vote
and relegated
to separate facilities that,
in most cases,
were decidedly unequal.
By World War I,
even the Catholic churches
would impose the color line.
But statutes alone
could not unravel
the racial complexity
of New Orleans.
Just before Jim Crow
was to take effect
on the city's streetcars
in 1902,
the president of one company
complained that the new law
imposed an unfair burden.
The company made a statement,
and I can't remember it
verbatim,
but the effect was
"Our conductors are intelligent,
educated men,
"and they're competent
and can do a reasonable job,
"but no one can tell
the difference
between blacks and whites
in this place."
NARRATOR: As if to prove
the point, in 1921,
long after blacks had been
barred from the polls,
Homer Plessy would fill out
a voter registration card
and list his race as "white."
WOMAN: On August the 29th
I'll never forget that day
Dooky Chase
really took a whipping.
We had five feet of water.
Five feet of water on the bar,
about three feet
in the dining rooms.
My whole restaurant is gone.
It is gutted all out.
I have nowhere to start,
nothing.
Okay.
Oh, this is a disaster.
This was once my
beautiful dining room.
(chuckles)
That was just there.
We had to rip out
that wall because,
you see, they tell you,
you rip out a foot over
or a couple of feet over
where the water stopped,
and the water stopped
along here, like two feet.
I worked the kitchen
seven days a week
from 8:00 in the morning
till we closed at night.
And that could get a bit weird.
You know.
Um, and you wonder
how you did it
or how you'd do it again
if you have to do it.
But I'd like to be
doing it again.
Back in the old days,
I married into the restaurant.
In '41, my mother-in-
law lived next door.
But you have to understand now,
in '41, African-Americans
did not eat out.
Well, they had no place
to eat out to begin with.
They had no restaurants,
as we know restaurants today.
Everybody Duke Ellington,
as great as he was,
there was no place for him
to eat, he had to eat here.
King Cole had to eat here.
Everybody had to eat here.
Oh, mercy.
These kettles, I'm glad
nothing happened to them.
See, 'cause the water
didn't get up to about,
maybe nine inches here.
But I can make 20 gallons
of gumbo in here
and 30 gallons in here.
So one lady say, "You can't
get rid of that stove."
"Some museum wants this stove.
Look how many people
you cooked for on this stove."
Well, I cooked
for a lot of people.
I cooked for Thurgood Marshall
on this stove.
I cooked for big daddy King
on this stove.
I cooked for everybody
on this stove.
But I think it's time for Leah
to get another stove.
I agree.
Oh, Lord, he agrees.
(chuckles)
He agrees, I get another stove.
(Leah laughing)
LEAH: This is going
to be a quick gumbo.
You know, the kitchen, to me,
is what saves me.
And that's the way
it is in New Orleans.
If you lose a member
in your family,
people start bringing you food.
Food is like
a healer to us.
And when we give it to you,
we feel like we're doing
something great for you.
Hey!
Hi. How's every little thing?
I'm doing fine. Hello, Mama.
We don't need to baptize.
You know, that's what the
Creoles would say, you know.
They make this
giant pot of gumbo.
Now, you'd make
a pot of gumbo like that
for an average family.
That's about
So when you got more guests,
you know, they say,
"Oh, Lord,
here come more guests.
We got to baptize the gumbo."
So that meant you had to put
a little bit more water
in the gumbo.
(chuckles)
LEAH: What people don't
understand about my restaurant
more than anything else, I have
to build a whole community.
People wonder why
you do what you do,
why you stay
in the neighborhood.
Well, you stay where
you're comfortable.
You stay where you're needed.
And I feel that
we need to be here.
We need to save
our neighborhood.
(cheerful conversation)
BIGUENET: When you travel
outside New Orleans,
if you're a New Orleanian,
you feel as if
you're always in exile.
People, in our experience,
after we fled New Orleans
because of Katrina, could not
have been more generous to us.
Everywhere we went, we were
offered the kindest hospitality.
But every gesture
of that hospitality
reminded us we weren't home.
The food was different,
the accent was different,
the coffee was weaker.
Everything pushed us
to come back,
where we'd be among our friends
and our community.
♪
NARRATOR: In New Orleans,
always and everywhere,
there was music.
And like the people
who lived there
at the turn of the century, it
came from all over the world-?
French waltzes
and Spanish habaneras,
German polkas, Irish ballads
and Italian arias,
rhythms at once African
and Cuban and Caribbean.
PIAZZA: Every different
strain in this city
maintained its color, and
each of them brought with them
a very vibrant musical culture.
Also, New Orleans had
a big tradition of street music.
There were all these
little groups of serenaders
who would go around,
and little string bands,
just like a mandolin and maybe
a fiddle and a guitar.
And they'd just kind of rove
the streets in the evening,
and they might stop
underneath your window
and play you a little, you know,
play you a little tune
or something.
You'd throw some,
throw some money down for them.
♪
You'd have
what they used to call
spasm bands, which were just,
like, little groups
usually of very young kids
who might have, like,
a kazoo and a washboard.
And this was constant.
♪
WOMAN:
I was well, I was ♪
SCHMIDT: I can remember when
everything was vended off the street.
And so a lot of the vendors
would have a chant,
"I got bananas!
I got watermelons!
I got bananas!
I have a watermelon!"
You know, they would
come down the street in a cart,
in a big wagon pulled by
a mule, you know.
And, uh, that was
all over the place.
NARRATOR: There were dozens
of brass bands in town,
and they played wherever
New Orleanians gathered-?
At picnics
and political rallies,
backyard birthday parties,
dance halls and saloons.
And in a city where,
as a visitor once observed,
"No hour of the day
was immune from a parade,"
they often brought the music
right into the streets,
providing accompaniment
for everything from Mardi Gras
and large celebrations
to funeral processions.
The sound seemed
to ricochet all over town.
"It was like a phenomenon,
like the Aurora Borealis,"
one New Orleanian recalled,
"that music could
come on anytime."
SALAAM: New Orleans is
an outside culture.
New Orleans, unlike most of
the rest of the United States,
has the procession
as part and parcel
of cultural daily life,
so that things move
through the community
rather than
the community going to one spot.
PIAZZA: If you're sitting in
your living room or your parlor
and a parade comes down the
street, you're likely to hear it
and to want to come out
and check it out,
the way all your neighbors
are doing.
It encourages a kind
of communal,
uh, celebration to occur
almost continually
in the neighborhoods.
SCOTT: There's a kind of intimacy
of living in New Orleans
that's a little bit different
than other places.
Even under segregation,
neighborhoods were
basically mixed.
I mean, people had
to experience each other.
KELMAN:
Rich, poor, white, non-white
People all live
on top of each other.
It's not a matter of choice.
You know, the city's not
so utopian as all that.
It's just necessity.
There's nowhere else to go.
The city's confined to
this narrow swath of land
that shadows the river.
So that leads to a kind
of really unusual cultural
mixing in New Orleans.
NARRATOR: As one Afro-Creole remembered
it: "We always swapped platters"
"of our best cooking with the
French and Italians next door.
Whenever we had dinner,
it was just over the fence."
SCHMIDT: I like to use the
word "various, variety."
We have a variety
of customs here.
And they're not diverse
in the sense
you draw a line
between you and me.
What it means is,
the culture is transmittable.
It transfers.
It doesn't depend
upon your race.
NARRATOR: So it was that in the
mid-1890s, all of New Orleans heard
what some would later call
"the big noise."
It came from way uptown,
from a neighborhood
of Irish, German
and African-American laborers,
many of the blacks
recent migrants
from the Mississippi Delta.
It had echoes
of the improvised music
those new arrivals
brought with them-?
The spirituals of the Baptist
church and the blues.
But it was set to the syncopated
rhythms of ragtime,
which was fast becoming the most
popular dance music in America.
The sound-? Which someone
dubbed the "hot blues" -?
Was unlike anything
New Orleanians had ever heard,
and they were mad for it.
Wherever the hot bands played,
the crowds followed.
They jammed the honky-tonks
and the dance halls,
cheering and stomping
and slow-dancing,
sometimes until sunrise.
"We had to change,"
one local player recalled.
"We couldn't make
a living otherwise."
Soon, musicians all over town,
black and white,
were riffing on the style,
and playing fresh, off-the-cuff
variations on the standards.
Even classically trained
Afro-Creoles had to admit
the black musicians uptown
were onto something.
"I don't know how they do it,"
one Creole violinist marveled.
"But goddamn, they'll do it.
"Can't tell you
what's on the paper,
but just play
the hell out of it."
SCOTT: We have never separated
so-called folk art and fine art.
The umbilical of our culture,
folk and fine,
has never been cut.
So one respects the other.
That's not true
in European culture.
I think once the folk
rises to a certain level,
there's a cutoff, and it becomes
something different.
Ownership changes.
With us, there is
no change in ownership.
So things that develop
in the street are absorbed
and constantly refined, even by
the so-called fine artists.
NARRATOR:
By the dawn of the 20th century,
the unique, hybrid culture
of New Orleans
had spawned a distinctive new
style of music:
A swinging fusion of African
rhythm and European harmony,
of bold improvisation
and technical virtuosity.
"Not spirituals or the blues
or ragtime," said one musician,
"but everything all at once,
each one putting something
over on the other."
PIAZZA:
What New Orleans really offered
at that extraordinary time
in its history
was a working model
of democracy at its most ideal.
You had a real melding of
all the different kinds
of musical forms.
You couldn't really take out
the French element
or the African element
or the Caribbean element
without unraveling
the entire fabric.
It wouldn't be the same thing.
NARRATOR: As yet, few
outside of New Orleans
had heard the new sound.
But in the years to come,
scores of musicians would
pack up their instruments
and hop aboard steamboats
and railcars headed north.
Among them: Nick LaRocca
and Sidney Bechet,
Kid Ory, Joe Oliver
and Jelly Roll Morton,
and a one-time hustler
turned trumpeting sensation
named Louis Armstrong.
Within a generation or two,
their music would be heard
all around the world.
By then
No one's sure just how
The New Orleans sound
had come to be known
as "jazz."
SCOTT: I think jazz is probably
the only original
American cultural contribution
to the world
that didn't come
from somewhere else.
Jazz was born
in the streets of New Orleans.
And it's amazing
that little bitty place
exported this product that
literally changed world culture.
MAYFIELD: The jazz story is
not only a musical story.
It's an American story
of a way of life.
You have to have people wanting
to participate with one another.
You know, we can think of cities
all around this country that
have had many years of having
all kind of cultures
living with one another.
But if they don't participate
in a certain way,
if they don't celebrate
together,
if they don't come
and marry these traditions,
you're not going to birth
anything significant like jazz.
And I think the city
of New Orleans did it
because of that participation.
POWELL: Well, New Orleans seems to
have the strongest local attachment
of any place I've ever lived in.
I think almost 80% of the people
who live there were born there.
SCHMIDT: In New Orleans, you didn't
feel as if you had to leave it.
There was no You didn't say,
"Oh, I could find
something better elsewhere."
People here were convinced
that this place
was the center of the universe.
RICK BRAGG:
When you walk down these streets
and you hear a 12-year-old kid
blowing his heart out
on a battered trumpet
Yeah, you can get trumpets
anywhere,
but there's something about
the sound of it here,
in the air.
You know, the land shifts
under your feet here.
Uh, makes no sense at all
to want to own a piece of it.
Yet, you know, a lot of us do.
(thunder rumbles)
NARRATOR: The rain began
to fall on New Orleans
sometime during the early
morning hours of April 15, 1927,
Good Friday.
Already since January,
there had been four storms
more severe than any
in the previous decade.
But this one would be the worst.
Over the next 18 hours,
some 15 inches
of rain would fall
More in one day
than New Orleans typically got
in its wettest month.
Uptown, in one
of the grand homes
that lined St. Charles Avenue,
James Pierce Butler, Jr.
Woke to the sound of the rain
lashing against his windows.
Butler cut an imposing figure.
Six-foot-five,
driven and notoriously aloof,
he headed up New Orleans'
Canal Bank,
the only one in the South to
rank among the world's largest,
and served as president
of the Boston Club,
a group that revered
wealth and power
every bit as much
as the Pickwickians.
He was also one of just six
private citizens
to sit on the Board
of Liquidation of the City Debt,
the agency that held the key
to the municipal coffers.
JOHN BARRY: It was a private
organization, made up almost exclusively
of the most important bankers
and lawyers in the city.
They had lifetime appointments,
like the Supreme Court,
but when one of them
died or left,
they named the next person
to succeed them.
They weren't named
by the governor or the mayor.
And the city couldn't issue
bonds for schools
or roads or anything else
without the approval
of this board
of self-appointed bankers.
NARRATOR: In years past, a
man of Butler's position
might have been alarmed
by the downpour outside.
To a city situated
largely below sea level,
heavy rain meant floods,
floods meant chaos,
and chaos was never good
for business.
But for now anyway, Butler was
not troubled by the storm.
The Wood pump would
take care of that.
POWELL: The Wood pump was
invented by a Tulane engineer,
A. Baldwin Wood, who worked
for the Sewage and Water Board.
And he came up with a pump,
uh a screw pump
that had enough power,
enough propulsive power
to not only lift up the water,
but then to push it out
over the levees.
And once you had
that hydrology in place,
so much becomes possible.
NARRATOR: The Wood pump
had been the cornerstone
of an ambitious
turn-of-the-century effort
to shore up the city's economy,
which had been faltering
ever since the Civil War.
Goods that once had floated
to market along the Mississippi
and through the Port
of New Orleans
now increasingly went by rail,
and anxious businessmen
had pressed for large-scale
civic improvements
in hope of making their city
more hospitable to commerce.
For much of its history,
New Orleans had suffered
a reputation as the most
unsanitary city in the country.
As late as the turn
of the century,
when the population
had topped a quarter million,
there still had been
no comprehensive sewage system.
Drinking water had come mainly
from mosquito-infested cisterns,
or else directly
from the murky river,
which also served
as the dumping ground
for most of the city's waste.
And then, there was
the so-called back swamp,
the cypress wetlands that stood
between the natural levee
and the shore
of Lake Pontchartrain.
LEWIS: It was known as the
quarter of the damned.
Because the consistency of
of the back swamp
is something between,
oh, let's say
overcooked pea soup
and warm Jell-O.
And in that climate
it's mosquito ridden.
There were yellow fever
epidemics periodically,
but they could do something
in New Orleans,
thanks to the Wood pumps,
that they had never done before.
And that was to pump out
the water in the back swamp.
NARRATOR: By 1914, the
city's new drainage system
consisted of seven pumping
stations and 70 miles of canals.
And the back swamp
was all but dry.
The impact was revolutionary.
Average life expectancy,
which in 1880 had been
fewer than 46 years, soared.
And for the first time
in its history,
New Orleans was freed
from the natural levee.
As then mayor Martin Behrman
put it,
"Land, before worthless,
became at once available
for agriculture
and city development."
Older neighborhoods soon
stretched north toward the lake,
and brand new neighborhoods
sprang up along its shores,
the most desirable of them
reserved exclusively for whites.
Meanwhile,
artificial levees were raised,
new shipping canals built,
the port modernized.
By 1920, construction
in the newly drained areas
had more than doubled the city's
property tax assessments
and business was
once again booming.
This was a time when a lot
of these cities New York City
and Philadelphia
and Baltimore are upgrading
their infrastructure
in major ways.
And New Orleans
was part of that.
It was one of these great kind
of civil engineering,
almost Promethean civil
engineering projects.
And, uh, we really were
on the forefront of that.
(thunder rumbles)
NARRATOR:
Now, on Good Friday 1927,
all that would be jeopardized
by a bolt of lightning
that knocked out
the central power station
and cut off electricity
to the Wood pumps.
By the time James Butler
woke that morning,
New Orleans had already begun
to fill with water.
At sundown,
more than four feet stood
in the city's streets.
KELMAN: The interesting thing
about that Good Friday flood
is that there's
a huge river flood
slowly bearing down on the city.
One of the biggest floods
in the nation's history,
the 1927 flood is moving
slowly and inexorably
toward New Orleans.
And so when the city fills
with water,
it has nothing to do with the
Mississippi River at all,
it's just a big rainstorm.
But the national press corps
is in New Orleans already
because it's covering
this huge river flood
and their photographers just
take pictures of a flooded city.
And they juxtaposed those images
with stories
of this horrendous river flood.
And it fuels panic.
NARRATOR: Although the Mississippi
posed no immediate threat
to New Orleans, the mere
prospect of a river flood
had sent the city
into a tailspin.
Local wholesalers already had
slashed their prices
in a desperate effort
to unload inventories.
Anxious residents, meanwhile,
were building boats,
withdrawing huge sums
from the banks,
scrambling to get out of town.
The storm and the pump failure
had served only
to ratchet up the hysteria.
And now, the city's investors
were getting jumpy.
By the close of business
on Good Friday,
most of the bankers in town,
including Butler,
had received urgent wires
from New York and elsewhere
demanding assurances
as to the city's safety.
KELMAN: So they decide
that they've got
to do something drastic.
They've got to demonstrate
to investors
that their money is safe.
They've got to demonstrate
to themselves,
to the city of New Orleans,
that they are safe
That they're not going
to be washed away
in this river flood that's
moving toward them.
So they decide to blow up
the levee below the city.
BARRY: Dynamiting the levee
would allow the river water
to escape like pulling
a plug out of a bathtub.
Uh, the Corps of Engineers
violently opposed the move.
They understood how weak the
entire flood control system was
and that that system was
going to break
hundreds of miles
above New Orleans.
So that water
was going to spread out
over its natural flood plain
and never get to the city.
But Butler and the rest
of the people in his group
were determined they were
going to dynamite the levee
and they were going to use
their political power
to make it happen.
NARRATOR: They chose a site
beyond the city limits,
13 miles downriver
from Canal Street
at a place called Poydras.
Dynamiting the levee there
would inundate
all of St. Bernard Parish
and part of Plaquemines Parish,
an area of interlocking wetlands
that was home
to some 12,000 people, most
of them just barely scraping by
as fur trappers or fishermen.
All were now slated
to be refugees.
Within a week
of the Good Friday Flood,
Butler and his allies
had organized themselves
into the ad hoc Citizens Flood
Relief Committee
and had manipulated the state's
high-ranking elected officials
into signing off on the plan
to blow the Poydras levee.
KELMAN: They ask for the right to
blow up the levee below the city.
And they get it
because of who they are.
To say no to them
is politically suicidal.
NARRATOR:
On Wednesday, April 27th,
residents of the
soon-to-be-flooded parishes
evacuated their homes
amid promises
that they would be compensated
for their losses.
Butler, meanwhile,
composed a wire destined
for banks and investors
all across the country.
"Decision to cut levee has
removed all danger to city,"
he wrote.
"Business and all other
activities
"are moving along
in a normal manner.
"New Orleans never has been
flooded by Mississippi River
and in our judgment
never will be."
Two days later,
with spectators jamming the road
that ran south
to St. Bernard Parish
and the families
of St. Charles Avenue
watching from their yachts
in the river,
the charges were set at Poydras.
KELMAN: They invite members
of the press corps
from throughout
the United States and the world
to go and view this.
They do flyovers
with military aircraft
to make sure that the area
is secure.
And then at a certain moment
they lower the plunger
(explosion)
and there's
this massive explosion
and then nothing happens.
It's a big dud.
It turns out that the levee
is better constructed
than anyone thought.
(explosion)
NARRATOR: It would take ten days
and 39 tons of dynamite
to finally breach the levee.
Before the job was finished,
another levee upriver would
give way, just as predicted.
There was never any real reason
to blow up the levee,
and that's probably the most
tragic element of the story.
For St. Bernard
and Plaquemines Parish
and the people who live there,
it's a disaster.
Makes them virtually
uninhabitable
for many, many months.
The Citizens Flood Relief
Committee promise
that they're going
to give them reparations,
and they never make good
on that promise.
BARRY: While these 12,000
refugees, created by the city
of New Orleans,
were being housed in warehouses,
Jim Butler and his colleagues
decided that they would
deduct the cost
of feeding these people
from any settlement
that they gave them.
They simply stiffed the victims.
So what this flood did
was wash away the surface
and reveal what lay beneath.
And what lay beneath
were some pretty ruthless people
who would use power
for what they regarded
as the best interest
of the city.
SCOTT: You have to be a
strange kind of being
to live in a place
this dangerous by nature.
I mean, we live in a bowl
surrounded by water
on a flood plain.
You can't bury people
belowground
because in the heavy rain,
caskets will pop up.
We've lived with yellow fever
mosquitoes, and we keep going.
Survival by improvisation.
WOMAN: Six.
MAN: Six?
WOMAN: Yeah.
MAN:
Every single one's made by hand.
The original Mardi Gras beads
were all made out of glass.
So we have a destroyed house,
and we're going to have this
is Rita and that's Katrina,
in bed together.
It's been an interesting project
because myself and, of course,
many other people, in fact,
do live in flooded houses.
And when we first came up
with the idea,
I wasn't too keen on it.
Interestingly,
as the month's gone on
and we kind of make jokes about
destroyed houses and everything,
it's actually had a healing
process for many of us.
MALE KREWE MEMBER:
The concept is:
Since we're having
so much trouble
getting the federal government
to take care of responsibilities
of building things back,
maybe the French will do better.
So by
we're asking the French to
rescind the Louisiana Purchase,
buy back Louisiana.
FEMALE KREWE MEMBER:
Our theme this year is.
"There's no place like home."
So we're going to drop a house
on some really bad politicians.
MALE KREWE MEMBER:
I know there was controversy
about whether we should have
Mardi Gras or not,
but we have to do
this sort of stuff,
you know,
to reenergize ourselves.
Well, everybody's been
making fun of the whole thing,
because that's the only way
you keep your sanity.
We can't give this up;
This is what we're made of.
Come on, baby,
let the good times roll ♪
Come on, baby, let me
thrill your soul ♪
Come on, baby,
let the good times roll ♪
Roll all night long ♪
Come on, baby,
yes, this is it ♪
This is something
I just can't miss ♪
Come on, baby,
let the good times roll ♪
Roll all night long ♪
Come on, baby,
while the thrill is on ♪
Come on, baby, let's
have some fun ♪
Come on, baby,
let the good times roll ♪
Roll all night long ♪
KELMAN: There's something
to be said for the fact
that when New Orleans
faces adversity,
when it's dealing with tragedy,
when it's down on its luck,
New Orleans' answer always
is to pop the corks,
have a good meal,
and then go dancing.
PIAZZA: One of the main things
that you learn from New Orleans
is how to participate
in life as it unfolds.
You learn to embrace the fact
that you can't control
everything in advance.
We have just a little while
to stay here,
and if we are lucky enough
to make it to the table again
for one more meal,
then that fact needs to be
celebrated and fully experienced
and lived to the hilt.
NARRATOR: The American
novelist Sherwood Anderson
once declared New Orleans "the
most civilized spot in America,"
the one city in the country,
he said, where there is
"time for a play
of the imagination
over the facts of life."
During the 1920s,
that recommendation
lured aspiring writers
from all over the country,
among them Hart Crane
and Robert Penn Warren,
Thornton Wilder, William
Faulkner and Ezra Pound.
By the end of the decade,
New Orleans had become
the literary capital
of the American South.
KENNETH HOLDITCH:
Rent was cheap,
food was very good
and very inexpensive.
Liquor was very inexpensive
and readily available
even though it was illegal
everywhere in the country.
All of those elements combined
to create a place
comfortable for the writer
or the artist
to be here and to be let alone.
POWELL: It's always been a special
scene where you could find some space,
where you could expatriate
without having to go
to Paris, for example.
And if you're marginal,
if you're, you know,
an exile from your own culture,
this is a place, I think, where
you can find some room to find
To define who you are.
NARRATOR: Now, late on the
night of December 26th, 1938,
a bus from Memphis deposited
another young writer
on the dark, narrow streets
of New Orleans.
Lugging a wind-up phonograph,
a portable typewriter
and a bound ledger
he used as a journal,
he made his way to a small hotel
on St. Charles Avenue
and checked in for the night.
His name was Tom Williams
and he'd come to New Orleans the
way the persecuted seek asylum.
After months of living in
his parents' home in St. Louis,
and under the gaze
of his disapproving father,
Williams finally had had enough;
And the morning after Christmas,
he headed for New Orleans,
"like a migratory bird,"
he later wrote,
"going to a more
congenial climate."
Less than 48 hours
after he arrived,
he confided to his journal:
"Here surely is the place"
"that I was made for, if any
place on this funny old world."
BRAGG: New Orleans offered
homes to creative people
and troubled people
and people who didn't fit where
they were, so they came here
to try to find some kind of
acceptance and some kind of,
uh more than acceptance
Happiness, you know.
You can find acceptance,
but New Orleans gave you
acceptance and happiness.
It let you
dance with people like you.
NARRATOR: Williams' first days in
New Orleans were a revelation.
He was mesmerized by
the architecture, by the light,
by the "rattletrap streetcars,"
as he called them,
one named Cemeteries,
another Desire.
But it was in the Vieux Carré,
or old French Quarter,
that Williams found New Orleans
its most alluring.
"This is the most fascinating
place I've ever been,"
he wrote his mother.
"I walk continually,
there is so much to see.
"The Quarter is really quainter
"than anything
I have seen abroad,
alive with antique
and curio shops."
Abandoned by white Creoles in
the years after the Civil War,
the Quarter since had been home
mainly to Italian immigrants
and poor blacks.
By the turn of the century,
it had been widely considered
a slum.
Then, in the 1920s,
the literary crowd had arrived
and discovered in the neglect
and decay a kind of romance
and a powerful source
of inspiration.
As Williams later put it,
the French Quarter was
"the last frontier of Bohemia,
a place in love with life."
BRAGG: Williams found home here.
Life is more naked here.
You hear smokestacks
and you hear streetcars.
Faith and ghosts and death are
all parts of this quilt here,
and it's just
you know, that's why writers
can't resist it.
It's just
it's never very far from you.
It's hard to walk past life
being lived here.
You've got to drop in on it.
I think you go
to a lot of cities,
and people will dress up
in the evening
to go to a cultural event.
In New Orleans,
you wake up in the morning
and you are in a cultural event.
HOLDITCH:
You know, there's an old saying
about New Orleans that
the typical New Orleans meal
is sitting around
eating fine food,
talking about what you had
to eat yesterday
and what you're going
to eat tomorrow.
And it's very tempting
to just be constantly partying.
Williams was always fascinated
by the people here
and the sort of
easygoing lifestyle.
NARRATOR: Williams quickly
settled into a routine.
In the mornings, he wrote,
seated at a rickety old desk
in his rented third-floor garret
on Toulouse Street.
Afternoons were spent
with other artists
who called the Quarter home,
parked at a sidewalk table
at the Café du Monde
or Napoleon House,
smoking cigarettes,
debating politics
and watching the world go by.
At night, he headed
for the infamous stretch
of Exchange Alley,
where men gathered in dimly lit
barrooms to meet other men.
Williams had had
homosexual feelings before,
but his upbringing
had been so austere
that he had not even recognized
them for what they were.
Now, for the first time, they
could be openly acknowledged.
"The liberating effects
of the city gave me
"an inner security I didn't have
before," he once said.
"I was able to write better.
I began to write with maturity."
HOLDITCH: He realized that
he could live the lifestyle
that he wanted to live,
that he had been suppressing,
without being noticed very much.
He said he found in New Orleans
a freedom he had always needed,
and the shock of it against
the Puritanism of his nature,
he said, gave him the material
he'd be writing about
for the rest of his life.
NARRATOR: About a month into
his stay in New Orleans,
Williams decided to enter
a national drama contest
and submitted
a collection of one-acts
entitled American Blues.
This piece he signed differently
from all the others
he had ever written-?
Not as Tom Williams,
but as Tennessee Williams.
In New Orleans, he had found
not only his voice but himself.
Late in his life, Williams would
insist that more than half
of his best work had been
written in New Orleans.
The city would provide
the setting
for six of his short stories,
five short plays,
and three full-length dramas,
including the iconic
A Streetcar Named Desire.
BRAGG: His writer's eye
caught the menace
Caught that glittering menace
in New Orleans.
He saw every speck of dirt.
I think he saw every speck
of broken glass.
And I think he shook
those things up,
like he shook them up
in a potion,
and poured it out
in his writing.
NARRATOR: "New Orleans and the moon
have always seemed to me to have"
an understanding between them,"
Williams later wrote,
"an intimacy of sisters
grown old together,
"no longer needing
more than a speechless look
"to communicate their feelings
to each other.
"This lunar atmosphere
of the city draws me back
"whenever a time of recession
is called for.
"Each time I have felt some
rather profound psychic wound
"a loss or a failure
"I have returned to New Orleans.
"At such periods,
I would seem to belong there
and no place else
in the country."
Oh, yes, what's up, man?
MAN: When I first came
to the French Quarter,
I went "Oh, my God."
"This is the best place
I ever seen in my whole life."
You know, "And I want to be here
right now, as long as I can be."
It's like all the people
that live around me are, like,
musicians and artists and poets,
painters, writers and stuff.
So you walk around
within this environment.
I think of it as kind of like,
uh, like a kid.
And you know like when
you have a kid in a playpen,
and they're in
an enriched environment,
they're always growing,
always learning, always alive,
and their IQ goes up,
everything,
their motor skills grow up.
Here, I think is,
this is a big playpen.
(singing bluesy tune)
The Quarter was built by people
like the French and Spanish,
who understood architecture
and understood aesthetics
and understood beauty
and created a living environment
for the people
to be enriched in.
And you can walk
through the Quarter
at 3:00 in the morning
on a January night,
and there's a full moon.
And in New Orleans,
you've got freaks
that have been here, you know,
freaks that have been here
for 300 years.
So it's, like,
it's okay to be here.
I always wonder, especially
when I'm making a poster
or a painting or something,
I'm wondering,
what does someone
who comes from somewhere else
see when they first
walk in here?
(couple shouting)
Tourists they come
and they want to see
what the real New Orleans
is about.
The sad part is that they come
to Bourbon Street,
they stay in a hotel,
they get drunk,
they see some titty dancers,
and then they go home and say,
"I don't know what's the big
deal about New Orleans is."
(playing "Key to the Highway"
by Jimmy Witherspoon)
I got the key ♪
To the highway ♪
I'm filled up and
I'm bound to go ♪
I'm gonna leave ♪
You think of New Orleans as,
you know,
like a place, longitude
and latitude on a map on Earth.
But in a sense, like,
New Orleans to me is an address
in the whole of the whole
of the universe of existence.
And if you match up
with that address,
if you're supposed to be here,
then you'll feel it.
You'll walk in here,
and you'll go, "Whoa!"
I'm gonna roll ♪
Down the highway ♪
Until the break of day ♪
Good-bye, so long, sayonara ♪
Arrivederci, hasta la vista ♪
See you later, baby. ♪
NARRATOR: At mid-century, New Orleans
had no native son more celebrated
than the great jazz trumpeter
Louis Armstrong.
Since leaving his hometown
in 1922,
he had performed
all over the United States,
made two tours of Europe,
played on scores of hit records
and appeared in a half-dozen
Hollywood films,
including one called
New Orleans.
"No band musician today on
any instrument can get through
32 bars without musically
admitting a debt to Armstrong,"
said the drummer Gene Krupa.
"Louis did it all,
and he did it first."
(ends on very high note)
(applause)
NARRATOR:
Now, in late February 1949,
the 48-year-old New Orleanian
was headed home,
to the city where both
he and jazz had been born.
The occasion was Mardi Gras.
New Orleans' premiere
black Carnival krewe,
the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure
Club, had invited Armstrong
to reign as king
in its annual parade
An event TIME magazine described
as "a broad, dark satire"
on the expensive white goings-on
in another part of town."
SCOTT: Zulu was a parody.
It was black people making fun
by imitating white people
imitating European royalty.
So it was almost like
a reverse minstrel show
on the absurdity of Rex
and Comus and those parades.
They just took it
to the extreme.
(cheering)
POWELL: If Rex came in the river
and Rex was wearing a crown
and a scepter,
well, Zulu would come down on
a barge in the New Basin Canal
wearing a lard can and waving
a banana stalk or something.
And they would wear black face.
They were black people
doing black face
to poke fun and say, "You know,
you may be making a lot of",
"a big to-do about race,
but, uh, here's what
we think about it."
It was a time for them
to vocalize dissent
when dissent had been
pretty much closed down.
And I think that's probably one
of the things sort of unstated
about, uh, Louis Armstrong,
why he, you know,
he was so anxious
to be part of it.
NARRATOR: Armstrong had
grown up with Zulu.
Most of the krewe's members
were longshoremen
from the Third Ward,
the gritty district on the edge
of the back swamp where
Armstrong had lived as a boy.
Like the rest of the kids
in the neighborhood,
he'd spent many a Mardi Gras
trailing behind.
Zulu and its band,
blowing on an old tin horn
in the so-called second line-?
The boisterous swarm
that spontaneously gathered
around most every parade
in New Orleans.
INTERVIEWER: I know that you
said in your interview with TIME
that you had
one great ambition in life,
and that was to be King Zulu,
and after that, you could die.
Is that right? ARMSTRONG:
Yes, that's right.
(laughter)
Okay, well,
I don't want the Lord
to take me literally, but
(laughter)
SCHMIDT: My mother was a
big Louis Armstrong fan.
That's all she played
was Louis Armstrong, you know?
Someday, you'll be sorry ♪
(singing scat)
That it was wrong. ♪
(singing scat)
That's all we heard.
I mean, it was like,
you know, um, uh,
it was constant.
And, um, one day
See, we were on
the, uh, parade route.
And it was 1949.
And we were standing
in the yard.
I'm five years old.
And, uh, this float goes past.
And this man in black face with
these big white lips, you know,
and the crown comes past.
My mother bent down.
She says, "George,
that's Louis Armstrong."
(laughing)
NARRATOR: Armstrong spent most
of the day on Zulu's float,
downing champagne and tossing
hand-painted coconuts
into the cheering crowds.
"People from all over the world,
his fans, had come to see him,"
one musician
in his band recalled.
"I've never seen anything
so beautiful in my life."
SCHMIDT: The Zulu parade in those days,
it just meandered all over town.
There was no route.
Although when Louis
was the king,
they brought it
onto St. Charles Avenue,
because he was so popular
with people down here,
whites and blacks.
NARRATOR: On Mardi Gras,
New Orleans looked
just as Armstrong remembered it:
Everyone mingling in
the streets, people of every hue
celebrating together
in a spirit of mutual respect,
if not perfect harmony.
But on Ash Wednesday, the city
returned to business as usual,
and Armstrong could see just
how much things had changed.
Some 570,000 people
now lived in New Orleans-?
Half again as many
as when he'd left town.
What then had been cypress swamp
now was mostly settled,
the muck replaced by parks
and golf courses
and California-style bungalows.
And though blacks and whites
continued to live side by side
in many parts of the city,
as they always had,
some neighborhoods,
like Armstrong's own Third Ward,
were fast becoming
predominantly black,
as many of the white residents
moved to new neighborhoods
nearer to the lake.
KELMAN: The 1940s are a
period in which you see
radical cultural changes
happening in New Orleans,
as the old residential
settlement patterns
in the city disappear.
The mixed housing patterns
where rich and poor
and black and white people
are living
right next door to each other,
that had so much to do
with the city's culture
and what made New Orleans
New Orleans.
And you see a new
New Orleans emerge.
NARRATOR: Armstrong had come
up in a time when Jim Crow
was still novel enough to be
flouted with some regularity
By both whites and blacks.
Now, even in the neighborhoods
that were still racially mixed,
segregation was a deeply rooted
feature of life in New Orleans
As pervasive and predictable
as the humidity.
I can remember my mother riding
to town, I guess you call it,
going to Canal Street
with one of our white neighbors.
They would talk to each other
at the bus stop,
they would get on the bus,
the neighbor would sit in front
of the screen,
my mother would sit behind
the screen and they would talk.
Segregation had become
so traditional,
I don't even know if they
understood the contradictions.
POWELL: Louis Armstrong
knew this wasn't really
the natural order of things.
The person who gave him money
for his first instrument
was a, uh, a Russian Jew named
Karnovsky on Rampart Street,
which was the black/Jewish
shopping district.
And, uh, I mean, that
kind of tells you something.
And he used to play
in an Italian bar.
And so when he came back and saw
this city being arch-segregated,
I think he was deeply offended.
I think he felt this really went
against what he thought
the true New Orleans was.
ARMSTRONG: Do you know what
it means to miss New Orleans ♪
And miss it
each night and day ♪
NARRATOR: Not even fame
could spare Armstrong.
I know I'm not wrong, the
feeling's getting stronger ♪
He was celebrated enough to be
given the key to the city,
but he still had to stay
in a Jim Crow hotel.
the Mardi Gras,
the memories ♪
Of Creole tunes
that fill the air ♪
SCOTT: Having sat down with royalty
and all the rest of these people
and had his humanity respected,
of course it was difficult
to come back to a place
where here it is, you know,
you're on a first-name basis
with kings
and some guy that owns
a run-down hotel
is going to tell you
"go to the back door."
Louis Armstrong didn't
have to tolerate that.
NARRATOR: Armstrong left New Orleans
in disgust, vowing never to return.
"Ain't it stupid?"
he would later say.
"Jazz was born there,
"and I remember when it wasn't
no crime for cats of any color
"to get together and blow.
"I don't care if I never see
the city again.
"Honestly, they treat me better
all over the world
than they do in my hometown."
(jazz piano plays)
SCOTT: Unless you understand the
so-called lack of contradiction
in contradictory things
in New Orleans,
it's going to be difficult for
you to understand New Orleans.
To explain it
in the simplest way is,
if you have ever seen
a second line in New Orleans,
you could have a thousand people
in the street.
Each one of those people
are actually dancing,
doing their own thing.
Absolute diversity.
But every last one of them are
dancing to the exact same beat.
Complete unity.
And it's harmonious
and it exists.
It's the only city in the world
that I know of
where you can have total unity
and absolute diversity
existing simultaneously
without contradiction.
NARRATOR: The news cameras
were already rolling
by the time six-year-old
Ruby Bridges arrived
at William J. Frantz
Elementary School
on the morning of
November 14, 1960.
This was, after all,
no ordinary school day,
and Bridges was no ordinary
first grader.
The instant she crossed
the threshold,
William J. Frantz became the
first integrated public school
in New Orleans.
Frantz Elementary was located
in the Ninth Ward,
a swampy, flood-prone district
downriver from
the French Quarter.
Long considered undesirable
by wealthy New Orleanians,
the area had first been settled
by poor blacks
and immigrant laborers
at the turn of the century,
and like some of the older
neighborhoods in the city,
it remained racially mixed.
BIGUENET: Racism took a very
particular form in New Orleans.
On a personal level,
there may really have been
a great deal of courtesy
between whites and blacks,
but on the other hand,
uh, institutionally,
in terms of
the educational system,
in terms of its wretched
public housing, um,
the effects of the
institutionalized racism here
were just as pernicious
as they were anywhere else
in the United States.
NARRATOR:
For more than 60 years,
ever since the Supreme Court
ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson,
most public schools
in the United States
had been strictly segregated.
In New Orleans, as in the rest
of the country,
those designated
for African-Americans
often had been
shamefully neglected.
But the ones in the Ninth Ward
had been among
the city's worst
Dilapidated, unheated
and so overcrowded
that school board officials
had resorted
to holding two half-day sessions
in order to accommodate
all the black students.
Then, in 1955, the Supreme Court
handed down
its landmark decision
in the case
of Brown v. Board of Education,
declaring "separate but equal"
unconstitutional
and demanding the speedy
desegregation of schools
throughout the United States.
CASSIMERE: I was in class
and the telephone rang.
And my teacher was always
serious,
but when she got off the phone,
she was smiling
and we knew it was something
important.
And she tried to explain to us
what had happened.
Immediately, I thought about
the whites in my neighborhood.
I lived in the lower Ninth Ward
at that time
and I wondered whether or not
we're going to be going
to school together.
I mean, I didn't realize that it
was really going to be
the beginning of mass exodus
of the whites
out of the public school system.
NARRATOR: By the time little Ruby
Bridges left Frantz Elementary
at the end of her first day,
a large crowd of angry whites
had gathered outside,
chanting racist slogans.
Two, four, six, eight,
we don't want to integrate!
Two, four, six, eight, we don't
want to!
NARRATOR:
Over the days that followed,
the crowd grew larger
and ever more vicious.
Meanwhile,
scores of white parents
pulled their children
out of school.
Did you just take your children
out of school? I did, I did.
Why did you do that? Because
they're not supposed
to go with the Negroes,
that's why.
Why do you say that?
Why?
Because they wasn't
brought up to go with 'em.
That's why.
What are you going to do
about an education
for your children now?
I'll work and go bring them
to a private school.
NARRATOR: For whites
opposed to integration,
the options were few.
They could send their children
to expensive parochial
or private schools,
as many wealthy
New Orleanians already did,
or they could join the migration
out to the suburbs,
which by now was well under way.
Like their peers in Chicago
and Detroit and Los Angeles,
middle-class New Orleanians had
been leaving the city in droves
since the mid-1940s,
following the direction
of newly completed highways
and causeways into
the surrounding parishes.
Now, desegregation
would fuel that trend,
and many Ninth Ward whites would
head east to St. Bernard Parish,
where they would find
all-white neighborhoods
and all-white schools.
For survival's sake we've had
to live together, right?
Together in the sense
of next to each other,
and if not accepting,
at least tolerating each other.
Come the '50s, the development
of the expressways,
they find a way to live
and not be together.
And if you're not living
next to each other,
you don't have to get along.
BIGUENET: New Orleans schools,
of course, suffered enormously
as whites fled,
and the tax base with them.
And schools became
predominantly black.
So integration isn't really an
accurate term for what happened.
It was simply a different kind
of segregation
that took its place.
NARRATOR:
Over the next several decades,
urban blight struck New Orleans
with a vengeance.
As huge numbers of middle-class
residents fled,
the city increasingly
fell victim
to violent crime and corruption,
its infrastructure crumbling
beneath the weight
of perpetual neglect,
its decline further
speeding the exodus.
Between 1960 and 2000, more than
100,000 New Orleanians,
including
some middle-class blacks
and nearly two-thirds
of the white population,
decamped to the suburbs.
SCHMIDT: With suburbanization,
what we lost was the consensus.
You may have had segregation,
but we all shared
the same cultural basis.
Everybody ate the same food,
everybody celebrated
the same celebrations,
they shared in
the same experience.
BIGUENET: We had a culture that
had been living
shoulder to shoulder,
pressed against
the Mississippi River,
and we wound up with
an isolation between families
that didn't exist in the city.
There was, um, a rupture
between a continuous life
that had been lived
for hundreds of years
in this particular place
and the way it flowed out
into surrounding parishes.
NARRATOR: By the beginning
of the 21st century,
67% of the city's nearly
half million people were black,
and 28% of them were living
below the poverty line.
Then, at the tail end
of the summer, 2005,
came the storm
that would change everything.
MALE REPORTER: The devastation that
we're seeing as we make our way
towards the downtown New Orleans
area is absolutely astonishing.
Completely underwater,
the entire residential area
FEMALE REPORTER: I am looking over
a scene of utter devastation,
an entire neighborhood,
and the water has come up
to the eaves of the houses,
and I am told
this is not the worst of it.
MAYOR: The city of New Orleans
is in a state of devastation.
We probably have 80%
of our city underwater.
FEMALE REPORTER:
It is just unbelievable.
I told you earlier today
I didn't think this had turned
out to be Armageddon.
I was wrong.
(trumpet and piano playing
"St. James Infirmary")
KELMAN: In the immediate
aftermath of Katrina,
some of the sadness and outrage
I think was a byproduct
of the fact
that people throughout
this country were seeing images
of poverty and racism
every night on their TV screens.
Americans had to confront
the fact
that there is
an African-American underclass
in this country
that lives in harm's way.
And that was very,
very unsettling.
♪
BIGUENET: People who were
here took their own boats
and went out and rescued people,
neighbors from rooftops.
They shared what little
food and water they had,
while we waited for the federal
government to arrive.
The federal government
took five days.
In the meantime, it was
New Orleans that saved itself.
♪
SCOTT: We are the glue that
keeps that city together.
It's the love of the place.
And maybe it's even
a love/hate relationship
between the people themselves
that keeps that thing together.
You know? Because there is
polarization in New Orleans.
I would be remiss
if I said otherwise.
But at the same time, you know,
there are events
and things there
that bring people together
unlike anywhere else.
Just like the Hebrew boy ♪
Locked in a fiery furnace ♪
Just like God's servant Job ♪
And the servant Moses ♪
God will do the same today ♪
Just let him have his way,
stand back! ♪
Stand back
and let my spirit go ♪
Oh, you better ♪
Take your hands up ♪
PIAZZA: With all its problems,
with all the racism,
with all the crime,
with all the poverty,
New Orleans has kept
its culture alive
and kept its history alive
Oh Stand back ♪
And let my spirit go ♪
PIAZZA: With all these
different elements
that have come together
and have marinated together
for hundreds of years,
there is a culture here
that is very precious,
beautiful and un-duplicatable.
Trouble on at your job ♪
Trouble on in the church ♪
Said Mary to Jesus ♪
Eyes full of tears ♪
She said my brother
wouldn't have died ♪
POWELL: I'm not sure that
that we could understand
American race relations today
without reference
to New Orleans.
I'm not sure American culture
would look the same.
It's one of these cities,
had you removed it
from the national equation,
I'm not sure America
would be the same.
And I don't think
you can say that for
for many other places
in the United States.
Let's all do it ♪
Oh, oh ♪
Stand back! ♪
(song ends)
(cheering, whooping)
(piano playing slow jazz)
("Do You Know What It Means
to Miss New Orleans?" playing)
GILL: America needs New
Orleans, because it needs
a place with a soul
that you don't find elsewhere.
This is a place where there is
invention and innovation.
America feeds off that,
even if people aren't
necessarily aware of it.
BIGUENET: We made music that
came up out of the neighborhoods
rather than being taught
in conservatories.
We took recipes that
our grandparents had taught us
and turned it into one
of the great cuisines on earth.
So this was a place that allowed
what was here to flower,
rather than trying to turn it
into something else.
There are very few places
that have made that choice.
SCOTT: The promise of that city
is the lesson that
can be learned from that city,
at its best.
When the people are doing
what they do naturally,
blending a seamless culture,
it has a oneness about it
that very few places
in the rest of this country has.
New Orleans' promise is,
we could teach America
how to be America
If anybody's listening.
♪♪
(song ends)