The drainage works allowed huge areas between the old city core and Lake Pontchartrain to the north to be drained, opening them for suburban development. Though this land was below sea level, the pumps, drainage canals, and new levees protected it from flooding.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, white New Orleanians seeking a suburban lifestyle leapfrogged over the Back o’ Town black folk, taking advantage of Jim Crow covenants that kept black families out of the new developments, migrating out to the Lakeview neighborhood, west of what today is City Park. Middle-class black families, including descendants of black Creoles, pushed in the same direction into Gentilly, a lakefront area of town sweeping from the eastern border of City Park to the western edge of the Industrial Canal. The 1935 founding of Dillard University, an interracial but predominantly African American private religious college, drew many black professionals to Gentilly’s Sugar Hill neighborhood, where the school was located. In the 1940s and 1950s, the city’s African Americans were no different from other Americans in the immediate postwar era: They wanted to move to the suburbs, too.
The migration of people of color into New Orleans’s northern reaches during and after World War II coincided with the rise of black political power in the city. In 1946, an Uptown lawyer named DeLesseps “Chep” Morrison ran for mayor with a reform agenda and openly courted the black vote—something no white candidate had ever done. Influential black leaders—chief among them the prominent black Creole civil rights lawyer A. P. Tureaud—backed him.
MORRISON WAS MORE PROGRESSIVE on race than many other white politicians, but “progressive” in the Jim Crow South was relative. He was publicly a segregationist—it would have been impossible for any white Louisiana politician to succeed otherwise—and not-so-privately a racist who referred to Negroes as “jiggerboos” and worse. Tureaud, who was the most important black Louisiana leader of the civil rights era and the local legal representative for the NAACP, later conceded that Morrison had never done much for his black constituency, but the fact that he made a point of consulting and being seen with African American leaders made him, from a black point of view, the best of a bad lot.
As a dynamic pro-business modernizer, Morrison pushed hard for the city’s economic development. He led the demolition of run-down neighborhoods in what is now the Central Business District, displacing thousands of African Americans. To help some of them relocate and to relieve pressure from the growing city’s housing shortage, Morrison endorsed creating the nation’s first black-only single-family subdivision, bankrolled by Jewish philanthropists and a housing grant from the U.S. government. It would be the far northeastern corner of Gentilly, on a 213-acre plot of privately owned land. The new neighborhood would be called Pontchartrain Park.
It was not an act of racial magnanimity on the white mayor’s part. When Morrison took office, he inherited a long-standing conflict over the beach at Seabrook, a strip of the Gentilly lakefront that black New Orleanians had been using for decades as a recreational spot to cool off in the sweltering summers. In the 1940s, African Americans were forbidden access to the new Pontchartrain Beach resort built where Elysian Fields meets the lake, so they moved down the shore to a site called Seabrook, east of the white neighborhoods. The city thought designating Seabrook a “Negro beach” would solve the problem.
But real estate developers fought to keep that from happening, fearing that giving black folks a beachhead in what they expected to be a prime real estate market would harm future profits. City officials did not formally set aside Seabrook for African Americans, but they did prevent all but the most minimal facilities from being built there, hoping that hardship would discourage black use of the site.
Black New Orleanians came anyway, despite substantial inconveniences and even mortal danger. The lakefront levee and seawall that made settlement in Lakeview and Gentilly possible also caused erosion, including offshore sinkholes that could suck swimmers under. The fancy sand shoreline constructed for the benefit of white bathers at sinkhole-free Pontchartrain Beach made the erosion worse for black bathers at Seabrook—and there were no lifeguards there to protect them. Black people responded to the threat by organizing swimming lessons and lifeguard services for themselves, and Seabrook’s summertime population grew. Like all New Orleanians, they learned to cope with the water that surrounded them.
In 1932, black leaders reportedly petitioned the city to provide police and lifeguard protection for the Seabrook bathers, and it appeared that the city was going to comply. But vehement protest from white homeowners in the area derailed that plan. White housing developments were moving closer to that far corner of Gentilly, and white homeowners wanted the lakefront ethnically cleansed, in part to protect their property values.
FINALLY, in the summer of 1940, the city effectively banned black people from the lakefront. Families who had been swimming there for ages found themselves forced out by police patrols driving black swimmers off the beach. In a 2012 article for Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine, Louise Marion Bouise told historian Andrew W. Kahrl what happened to her family that summer, after the truck driver who taxied them to Seabrook from the city dropped them off.
“We weren’t there very long when policemen came along and told us we couldn’t swim on the lakefront, that we’d have to go. We couldn’t even stay on the lakefront and wait for the truck driver to come back to pick us up,” she said. “We walked from the lakefront home, which was on St. Bernard and Broad. And in the party was one of our friends, a teenager, or he was ten by that time. He had a deformed leg, but these policemen [said] you’ll have to move. And this young man with his brace on his leg walked all that distance home.”
As the city increased pressure on black people to stay away from Seabrook, it encouraged them to relocate miles to the east, to a hard-to-get-to site the Levee Board had acquired and dubbed Lincoln Beach. The waters there were snake-infested and contaminated with raw sewage from nearby fishing camps, but it had one advantage from the city’s point of view: It made black folk invisible.
Black New Orleanians were not eager to use this beachfront Bantustan, but the city was not going to let them return to Seabrook. During World War II, the city used the proximity of military facilities as an excuse to ban Seabrook bathers (though white fishermen could be seen along its shore). After the war, city government under the new mayor, Chep Morrison, attempted to resolve the long-standing conflict. The city made another go at establishing Lincoln Beach as a separatist enclave, equal to the whites-only Pontchartrain Beach, dedicating half a million dollars to upgrade the facilities. It opened in 1954.
Black people still did not show up in the expected numbers, not only because Lincoln Beach remained much too far away for many people to travel to, especially for those without cars, but also because black ministers urged their congregations to boycott it in resistance to Jim Crow laws. Meanwhile, the national NAACP resolved to undertake a full frontal legal assault on Jim Crow, which had been sanctioned nationally by the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision declaring that separate but equal was constitutionally valid. Local NAACP attorney A. P. Tureaud championed efforts in New Orleans, where Homer Plessy, a Creole (black under Louisiana law) first challenged Jim Crow in 1892.
The feeling was rising among the city’s fast-growing African American population that change had to come. Besides, black folk were starting to return to Seabrook, leading one horrified white Gentilly resident to write to Mayor Morrison to complain that black people changing into bathing suits “look like a lot of naked savages out of Darkest Africa.”
Morrison may have been a segregationist, but he was also a pragmatist. He knew that the only chance white New Orleanians had for maintaining segregation was with separate accommodations for black people that truly were equal. In 1949, Tureaud filed suit on behalf of the NAACP to desegregate New Orleans city parks and golf courses—including Audubon Park, in the heart of Uptown New Orleans—all of which
had been off-limits to black people except, in some cases, on specially designated days. Faced with mounting political and legal challenges to segregation, Morrison concocted a plan to solve several problems at once—black housing, restricted black access to city parks, and black need for a decent beach on the lake. It was to be an all-black middle-class housing development in the Seabrook area that would coincide with black access to the lake nearby. That was how Pontchartrain Park—the neighborhood where I grew up—was born.
At the center of the planned community was a Negro-only public park, about two hundred acres of playgrounds, ball fields, and an eighteen-hole golf course laid out by Joseph Bartholomew, an African American New Orleanian who had designed the city’s best golf courses, and others throughout the South. Though Bartholomew, a childhood caddy for white golfers in Audubon Park, had created the city’s best golf courses, Pontchartrain Park would be the only one on which he was allowed to play. That’s the logic of segregation.
Tureaud strongly opposed Pontchartrain Park, correctly seeing it as a residential version of Lincoln Beach: a concession to black demands that was intended to strengthen Jim Crow. Nevertheless, in 1954, Pontchartrain Park opened with a thousand modern ranch-style homes on sale. Our prefabricated house was standard for the neighborhood: twelve hundred square feet, three small bedrooms, a den, a living room, a galley kitchen—all of which seems impossibly cramped by today’s standards. The price? Between $9,500 and $25,000.
AMOS AND ALTHEA PIERCE were among the early buyers. They bought their dream home at the sales office downtown and stood there on Debore Drive, with their baby son Stacey, watching workmen deliver its parts on a truck and put it together.
At that time, decent housing for black folk was a rarity, a luxury. When you had an entire neighborhood of nice homes for black families, it was seen in the community as a whole that those black people must be rich. My mother said to us kids, “Listen, we are not rich. In case you don’t know it, we are poor.” She was a schoolteacher, and Daddy worked at the time at a furniture store. But housing was so bad for so many African Americans that, to them, our little brick houses in Pontchartrain Park were a kind of paradise.
The neighborhood filled up with families based on word of mouth. Shortly after we moved in, Daddy told one of his army buddies about the development, and he bought a house there. This also happened with teachers from Mary D. Coghill elementary school, where Tee taught. Dave Bartholomew, the lyricist who wrote hit songs with Fats Domino, lived around the corner. Ernest “Dutch” Morial, who in 1978 became the city’s first black mayor, lived there. His son Marc, who served as New Orleans mayor from 1994 till 2002, and who now leads the Urban League, is a son of Pontchartrain Park. Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard grew up there too, as did Lisa Jackson, tapped by President Barack Obama to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
Most residents, of course, were only local heroes, but heroes they were. Coach Macburnette “Mac” Knox was our Eddie Robinson, our Vince Lombardi. He was at the center of the universe to us kids because he ran the Pontchartrain Park playground and coached football, basketball, and baseball. Coach Mac made sure all his players got home safely after practice. There was Leonard Morris, the postman and horn player, who would later save neighbors in his boat during Katrina, even though he was sick with cancer at the time.
Pontchartrain Park proved to be a magnet for black middle-class families because it helped build stable, secure lives in material conditions that, however separate, truly were the equal of whites. The only real difference between the housing and streetscapes in Pontchartrain Park and its next-door twin, Gentilly Woods, was the color of the homeowners’ skin. The content of their character—hardworking, family-oriented, respectable—was exactly the same.
In 1959, post office worker and NAACP mainstay Arthur Chapital opposed the creation of a New Orleans campus of Southern University in Pontchartrain Park. (This was contrary to the initial inclination of the NAACP and A. P. Tureaud, though by 1969, Chapital persuaded them to file a suit against the dual-race college system.) A black newspaper derided it as “a Jim Crow commuter college.” But SUNO was built anyway, opening in September 1959, providing the neighborhood with a historically black state university.
In the end, thanks to the tireless efforts of Tureaud and civil rights lawyers across the country, neither the Jim Crow subdivision, nor the Jim Crow golf course, nor the Jim Crow university protected Jim Crow. Court decrees would integrate parks and universities, and housing by outlawing restrictive covenants preventing sale of white-owned housing to black families. In the 1960s and 1970s, with all legal vestiges of segregation swept away, white flight from the city (in part a response to integration), opened up more Gentilly housing to African Americans. There’s a startling historical irony here: Though New Orleans has never been more socially integrated, its housing patterns today have never been more segregated.
I WONDER WHAT TUREAUD, who died in 1972, would say about this. I’ve thought about what I would say to him about Pontchartrain Park, which became an incubator of so much African American excellence and professional achievement.
To give Tureaud his due, his belief that ghettoization had to go was noble and justified. He was not a single-minded integrationist. Tureaud was a sophisticated student of politics. He understood that if black folk had no access to mainstream economic power—that is, if they satisfied themselves with running small businesses that catered only to a black clientele—government would never take them seriously. Full citizenship requires full access. Every time black people accepted separate-but-equal crumbs from the table of whites, Tureaud believed, they strengthened white supremacy. Black self-sufficiency was an important good, but embracing it threatened to vitiate an even more important good—full access to all that the nation offers.
If I could sit down with Tureaud today, I would tell him: You were, and you are, absolutely right. We don’t want separate but equal. But Amos and Tee’s generation could not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. They had to take what was available to them, while they continued to stand with you in pressing forward the fight against segregation.
When Daddy came back from World War II, there were parts of the city in which he was born and raised that were off-limits to him because of the color of his skin. Yes, Pontchartrain Park was an act of appeasement by a white power structure that wanted to maintain its supremacy. Yes, Pontchartrain Park contributed to housing segregation in New Orleans. All of this is true.
But you know what? Pontchartrain Park gave our people a beachhead on which to establish a base that would carry the fight for equality into the next generation. When folks like Daddy and Tee bought their houses, they could not have imagined that they would see fair housing laws in their lifetime. They could not have predicted that the city’s parks and universities would one day be open to them and their children (for which we have you above all to thank, A.P.). What they saw was the chance to make a decent life for their families, same as every other American had.
These ordinary black folks were civil rights pioneers too. They had to drive through the all-white Gentilly Woods to get home every night. They endured whites throwing batteries at their cars. My father bought the first gun he ever owned after white thugs began knocking on doors in Pontchartrain Park and punching black housewives when they answered. Yet they endured, they stood their ground and built a strong neighborhood where nearly everybody owned their homes, where folks were modest in income but rich with pride, where every child had access to a decent education, and where there were two parents in every household. Anything I am able to accomplish on stage, on screen, or on any other platform, I owe to my upbringing in Pontchartrain Park, Mr. Tureaud—and I know that I am not the only son or daughter of our neighborhood who feels that way.
The phrase “comforts of home” calls to mind bourgeois coziness, but the term actually connotes something more powerful. “Comfort” comes from Latin
words meaning “to strengthen.” In that sense, the comfort my generation received through their love of the Pontchartrain Park community, for us a haven in a heartless world dominated by white supremacist ideology, strengthened all of us, Mr. Tureaud, to carry forward the crusade that civil rights lawyers fought in the courtroom, and that my father fought in the South Pacific, for an America that lived up to its promise.
All his life, Daddy talked about the day he and Tee saw their house delivered to their little patch of paradise. He said that black folks back then would say, “Man, you must be rich if you live in Pontchartrain Park.” It wasn’t true. That modest rancher cost thirteen thousand dollars, and it took Daddy and Tee thirty years to pay it off. After he paid the last note, he framed the “paid in full” notice and hung it on the wall of his home office. It became an informal symbol of Daddy’s authority, invoked whenever one of his sons gave him any lip. “You can say whatever you want,” he would thunder, “but you see that thing on the wall? It says this is my house.”
No, we weren’t rich, but we were rich in spirit, and rich in dignity, and rich in love—and that intangible wealth paid off handsomely in the next generation, with political and economic gains made by the children of Pontchartrain Park. Maybe you couldn’t have foreseen that back in the fifties, Mr. Tureaud. If so, that’s understandable. You were putting your life on the line, literally, to fight for our freedom. The compromise my mother and father’s generation made by moving into Pontchartrain Park looked to you like a retreat, a surrender.
And yet, if you were with us today, I am confident that you would agree with the judgment of Herman Plunkett, a Dillard administrator who moved into Pontchartrain Park in 1961: “It came out of something ugly, but it turned out to be something beautiful.”
The Wind in the Reeds Page 7