Faubourg Treme. Born from the immigration that followed the Haitian revolution of the early 1800s and named for French milliner and property owner Claude Treme, the neighborhood became an entertainment center where white and black Creoles gathered. The wave of Haitian refugees added to a New Orleans that was already a mix of French, Spanish and African-American culture, with American influence filtering in after the 1803 purchase of the territory from France. New Orleans was still largely confined to the French Quarter – the original city founded in 1718. Treme and other outlying neighborhoods were farms or swamps until efforts to drain the land took hold as the population grew.
Treme is the site of St. Augustine, one of the oldest African-American Catholic church parishes in the nation, where famed clarinetist Sidney Bechet was baptized in 1897 and where Homer Plessy was a parishioner. In 1892, Plessy triggered the infamous U.S. Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal.”
It’s also the site of Congo Square, where during the 18th and 19th centuries slaves were permitted to dance, trade goods and play music that would evolve into jazz. Generations of musicians hail from Treme, among them Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and his grandfather, the late Ooh Poo Pah Doo singer Jesse Hill.
A century before the Harlem Renaissance and the modern Civil Rights Movement, Treme was a center of black cultural and political ferment. In 1862, after Northern troops captured the city, Paul Trevigne edited the oldest black-owned daily newspaper in the U.S., The Tribune, which became an eloquent advocate for African Americans’ civil rights. Before the 14th,15th and 16th Amendments, it demanded the right to enlist in the Union buy viagra brampton army, to vote and to be subject to equal treatment under the law.
With the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877, however, white supremacists rapidly rolled back black gains. Separate and unequal schools were re-established and 99% of black citizens were purged from the voting rolls; anyone who protested was likely to be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan.
The black population was devastated but precisely during this dark period, a new kind of music was born in Faubourg Treme: jazz. Legendary jazz great and New Orleans native, Wynton Marsalis observes that this music gave African Americans, excluded once again from mainstream American society, a free cultural space to voice their grief and hopes.
Treme was a hotbed of New Orleans’ civil rights struggles in the ‘50s and ‘60s but with its success prosperous residents began to move out. The familiar pattern of inner city urban decay set in poverty, crime, drugs. Urban re-development rammed an interstate highway through the business center of the neighborhood and historic homes were replaced by demoralizing segregated housing projects. Faubourg Treme even lost its name; now it was simply known as the Sixth Ward.
Then in late August, 2005, Katrina hit. The indifferent, incompetent federal response to the catastrophe left many residents angry and discouraged; once again, as with slavery and Jim Crow, America seemed to have rejected its African American residents.
Today, New Orleans’ Treme neigborhood is the locale for visitors and natives alike to celebrate the achievements of African Americans. Scholars and historians have shared their immense knowledge with New Orleans residents and now Treme is home to several museums dedicated to African American life, art, and history, as well as Armstrong Park, a memorial to the great jazz legend Louis Armstrong.
