Room One: Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans
While Claiborne Avenue did not exist on the earliest maps of New Orleans, settlement at its current location began almost as soon as the establishment of the city. Indigenous people of the Mississippi River Valley gathered in New Orleans well before the arrival of the French, during the late 1600s. Biloxi, Houma, Chitimacha, Creek, Qapaw, Caddo, Choctaw, Tunica, Atakapas, and other nations took advantage of seasonal patterns to gather here, a place marked by a well-worn pathway between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. The French called the pathway Le Chemin du Bayou, the Bayou Road. The road curved slightly northward just at the spot where Claiborne Avenue would later develop.
African Life in Colonial New Orleans
As their colonial city grew, the authorities of the Company of the Indies needed building materials. The first brickyard in New Orleans was established by the Dreux Brothers (Mathurin and Pierre) in 1717 on the Bayou Sauvage, on the present-day Gentilly Ridge. As demand for building materials expanded, Charles de Morand, Sr. built a brickyard on his property closer to the city, land at the present-day intersection of Bayou Road and Claiborne Avenue. Morand’s brickyard, situated on the outskirts of the colonial settlement gave the neighborhood a “combined indigenous and African presence…[and] became a prime location for clandestine gatherings of all kinds.”[1] Before the name Claiborne was even known in Louisiana, Africans and people of African descent consecrated the area that would become Claiborne Avenue with song, dance, foodways, and daily life. Even as they gave shape to the built environment of New Orleans in the eighteenth century, the earliest Black inhabitants of the city laid a foundation for the cultural practices that would define it in the twentieth century.
Morand arrived in Louisiana prior to 1720 as a surveyor’s assistant to Adrien de Pauger and Pierre Le Blond de la Tour. According to Toledano and Christovich, “Morand established a brickyard under the aegis of the [C]ompany [of the Indies]” prior to 1730. The Company of the Indies went bankrupt in 1731, at which time Morand bought the brickyard and established his family residence there, which included seven enslaved servants for his household and five enslaved laborers at the brickyard.
In 1765, an inventory of the property described “a camp for Negroes enclosed by standing stakes, three-fourths of which are worn out and a few are missing. The thirteen Negro cabins of boards into the ground in both and bad condition.” In 1772, the number of cabins for the enslaved had grown to fifteen. Paul Moreau bought the entirety of the “the great Morand tract behind the city on both sides of Bayou Road” on April 25, 1775.
[1] Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 176-177.
Early Establishment of Claiborne Avenue
The neighborhoods along the future Claiborne Avenue continued to develop into the nineteenth century. In 1794, Spanish colonial authorities established a canal between the city and Lake Pontchartrain, seen in the 1815 Plan of the City and Suburbs of New Orleans by Jacques Tanesse. Ocean going vessels already had easy access to the lake and the canal enabled smaller vessels to transport goods from the city and its hinterland to these larger ships. Vessels used the Old Basin, next to Congo Square, as a turnaround and warehouses lined the canal itself, leading to increased density in the neighborhoods.
Many residents were free people of color and even enslaved people who “lived out,” away from their purported owners. The arrival of refugees from Haiti also contributed to population growth in this part of the city. These refugees included a large number of sugar planters who had become very rich on Saint-Domingue and it included, as well, a large number of free men and women of color. In direct contravention of federal law, furthermore, these refugees brought with them a large number of enslaved men, women, and children. The importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1808 but, here in 1809, the Governor of Louisiana Territory – William C. C. Claiborne – beseeched Congress and President James Madison to make an exception, which was granted.
By the 1840s, residential development in the city began to stretch behind Claiborne Avenue for the first time, represented by the shaded area in this 1842 map, New Orleans, Comprising its Municipal Divisions and the City of Lafayette.
African Americans and Emancipation
Separated by legal status between free and enslaved, African Americans in New Orleans nonetheless coalesced into a single community as the nineteenth century progressed but dramatically so beginning during the Civil War. The gens de couleur libre served as a harbor for African culture and community during the antebellum years. Prior to emancipation, the gens de couleur libre used the slave system as a strategic means of maintaining kinship and family alliances by purchasing relatives and loved ones. After Union forces captured New Orleans in April 1862, alliances developed between the enslaved men, women, and children of the city and Union forces. The alliance attacked the power of those who claimed human property and began to chip away at the legal underpinnings of slavery. Enslaved men, women, and children self-emancipated themselves with courageous moves away from the homes of their purported owners to the ostensible safety of Union fortifications. With the conclusion of the war and Emancipation, the old libre community and the newly freedpeople continued the tradition of strongly asserting their civil rights with public displays and legal efforts to protect their rights.[1]
More often than not, especially during the early years of Reconstruction, this community claimed Claiborne Avenue as the site of its political activism. The St. Nom de Jesus church at Claiborne and Ursulines was the site of one early celebration. With the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and reversal of the doctrines of African-exclusion from constitutional protections, this community acted immediately to assert and protect the rights. On February 19 and 20, 1865, the New Orleans community of color staged a funeral to observe and celebrate “The Death of American Slavery” (Mort de l’esclavage Americain). When word reached New Orleans on February 11 that Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment and sent the question of abolishing slavery to the states for ratification, people of color went to work planning a fitting way to bury the cruelties and indignities they had spent their lives enduring.[2] French-language advertisements placed in the pages of the Tribune newspaper in the first weeks of February promoted the funeral. On Sunday, February 19, a priest offered a Te Deum to give thanks. The next morning, 10 o’clock on Monday, a priest gave another “mass of solemn Jubilation” (messe solonnelle de Jubilation). After the Monday morning mass, the congregants buried the lifeless body of “the infamy” (l’infame) of slavery. The advertisement invited “all who have suffered under the monster…to come throw some dirt upon the cadaver” (tous ceux qui ont en a souffrir de ce monstre, sont invites a venir jeter une terre sur son cadaver). This display unified the people of color under a single banner regardless of the prewar status of any one individual.
In October 1865, Claiborne Avenue and the side streets of Tremé hosted a mass march for African American rights “to make a public political demonstration, and to prove that we are men.”[3] It was one of the earliest moments of full-fledged political participation for the community of African descendants in New Orleans. “Their sole presence on Claiborne street will show that they take an interest in their political future,” wrote the editors of the New Orleans Tribune, the first newspaper in the United States published by African Americans for an African American audience. Richard C. Baylor, a formerly enslaved dockworker turned political organizer, called for the march to raise funds to enable the Universal Suffrage Party to send delegates to Washington to secure the right to vote. The march ended at the Republican Party headquarters on Union Street, near Baronne, where each marcher pledged $1 to the cause of universal suffrage, raising a total of $500. The 73rd United States Colored Infantry, including members who had fought during the war in the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and the 1st District Emancipation Club, drawn from the ranks of the newly emancipated African American labor force, led a disciplined parade that commenced on Claiborne Avenue. The 73rd USCI marched with the group as “a two fold display--display of force and display of patriotism.”[4] The editors of the Tribune made an earnest plea for interracial cooperation. “There is no need to be colored or to be a disfranchised citizen to take part in the proceedings. We understand that all radicals, all friends of justice and Universal Suffrage, will join in the procession.” Baylor made his invitation, though, “To the colored cotton weighers, cotton pressmen, generally, levee stevedores and longshoremen.” When Baylor appealed to black laborers, he consciously appealed to a group facing the prospect of exercising their own political power for the first time. The paper’s words ring true that “the people…readily cooperate in this kind of celebration…a holiday for the disfranchised.” During the early years of Reconstruction, African Americans chose Claiborne Avenue as the site to forge their revolutionary alliance in the quest for voting rights.
[1] For the situation in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Emancipation, see James Illingworth, “‘Erroneous and Incongruous Notions of Liberty’: Urban Unrest and the Origins of Radical Reconstruction in New Orleans, 1865-1868” in Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly, eds., After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013), 35-67.
[2] The timing of the funeral just over a week before Mardi Gras deserves notice. Though the United States Congress certainly took no notice of the Carnival season when it passed the amendment, New Orleanians would have known that Mardi Gras was coming on February 28. The proximity of the funeral for American slavery and that year’s Mardi Gras suggests that the event belongs to the Claiborne Avenue Carnival tradition, as well.
[3] Tribune, October 22, 1865.
[4] Tribune, October 31, 1865.
A Thriving but Segregated Musical Community
While Claiborne Avenue reached the peak of its commercial density and its musical denizens found their greatest global popularity during the 1960s, the musical history of the street reaches back to the late-nineteenth century. Through oral history interviews, chronology melts as distant pasts infiltrate successive generations and filter down to our perspective in the present through musicians’ memories of Claiborne Avenue. Jazz came first in New Orleans. In Michael White’s telling, informed by a local history handed to him by his musical colleagues, African Americans in New Orleans during the 1890s chafed at “Jim Crow [and] anti-black legislation” but refused to allow political oppression to negate their “culture of celebration [or] appreciation of life.” In the face of the violent backlash against African American political equality by white conservatives, “They responded with boycotts, and protests, and legal actions. It is not a coincidence that one of the most famous legal court cases – Plessy v. Ferguson – and then jazz, which originated here, happened in the same decade, at the same time.”[1] Musicians in New Orleans first performed jazz in the red-light district known as Storyville, the rear boundary of which skirted Claiborne Avenue.
The history of musical tradition in and along the stompin’ grounds of Claiborne is rich and multifaceted. The well-known names of early jazz, such as Professor Tony Jackson, Alphonse Picou, Jelly Roll Morton, Bunk Johnson and Sidney Bechet, honed their skills in music venues along Claiborne, as did musicians of later eras, such as Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, Little Richard, and Sam Cooke. Claiborne Avenue clubs and bars formed part of what was known as the Chitlin’ Circuit, where nationally popular musicians would travel and play for predominantly Black audiences. The Chitlin’ Circuit allowed for tremendous cultural exchange where artists both influenced and were influenced by the sounds coming out of New Orleans.
The professional and artistic commitment to protecting the rights of African American musicians on Claiborne Avenue stretches back to the establishment of the "Negro Musicians’ Union," the American Federation of Musicians Local 496, at 1480 North Claiborne Avenue. Indeed, the progression of jazz and R&B in New Orleans mirrored the ongoing social and political advancements of the twentieth century civil rights pioneers, many of whom were from the Tremé and Seventh Ward communities and who did much improvising of their own in the ongoing fight towards freedom. Tremé musicians deeply connected to North Claiborne were midwives to the birth of jazz. The formation of the African American musicians’ union “Local 496” was equally inventive - using improvisation and initiative in the face of strict racial segregation laws. Only one musicians’ union was allowed within the city limits of Orleans Parish and the “American Federation of Musicians Local 174” (chartered in 1902) barred African American musicians from membership. Therefore in 1926, founders of the Black union “Local 496” chartered in Mississippi then immediately changed its address - to 1408 North Claiborne Avenue. The union became a central hub on the Avenue where musicians would complete the administrative tasks necessary to make a living as performers in New Orleans and where they would pick up their checks, run into each other, and socialize. In 1951, Local 496 moved to 1480 North Claiborne Avenue, where it remained until it merged with the white Local 174 to form Local 174-496, in 1969.
[1] Michael White interview with Raynard Sanders and Katherine Cecil, May 8, 2019.