Opinion | Gentrification Might Kill New Orleans Before Climate Change Does

New Orleans in 2019 is actually feeling much as it did in 1837, the year when The Picayune, precursor of The Times-Picayune, first hit the streets. During that era, following the Louisiana Purchase, then statehood in 1812, swarms of Anglos had begun pouring into the former French colony. The newly arrived Americans and the native Creole population fought bitterly about the language that would be spoken, the dances that would be danced and the degree of racial oppression that would be official state policy.

Back then, The Picayune ended up on the side of the newcomers, as a decidedly pro-American newspaper. For most of its history it fought vigorously against everything that was good, right and distinctive about New Orleans. Even in the 19th century the city, for all of its problems, had rich, multiracial traditions. Yet for decades, the paper either ignored or pilloried that city’s music, gastronomy and other cultural expressions. Those traditions, borne out of the relatively mild racism of the French and Spanish colonial periods, allowed the town to develop a vibrant, politically active, partially free black middle class.

The traditions often transcended race, as they still do in many ways today. But Picayune staff members like the popular society page columnist in the 1930s, Dorothy Dix, instead repeatedly denigrated the role of “Negro mammies” in, for instance, the development of Creole cuisine. Leah Chase, and those who taught her, would rightfully disagree.

Jazz, the emblematic sound of New Orleans, was infamously disowned in a June 1918 Times-Picayune column: “We do not recognize the honor of parenthood,” the editorial read, and “where it has crept in we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it.”

Ashton Phelps, a former managing director of the Picayune and a veteran of the White League, the terrorist militia that attacked the city’s interracial Republican Metropolitan Police at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1872 and effectively put an end to Reconstruction in Louisiana.

In a detailed mea culpa published in 1993, The Times-Picayune admitted for “the greater part of its years, the newspaper gave readers an image of black people as intellectually and morally inferior, relegated to a lower social caste than white people and often little more than lazy or criminal.” By the time David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and former state congressman, made the runoff in Louisiana’s 1991 race for governor, The Times-Picayune was his most powerful critic, publishing devastating articles laying bare his history, earning it local and national praise.