New Orleans

New Orleans carries one of the longest continuous Black urban histories in the United States, and two of its most documented twentieth-century displacements. Tremé, the oldest continuously inhabited African-American neighborhood in the country, grew around Congo Square from the early nineteenth century. In 1966, the state and the federal highway administration routed the I-10 Claiborne Expressway through the heart of it, on an elevated deck above North Claiborne Avenue. Crews cut down more than 500 live oak trees and dismantled the Black commercial corridor that had run under their canopy for a century. Four decades later, a second wave came through the same area. After Hurricane Katrina, HUD and the Housing Authority of New Orleans demolished the Iberville, Lafitte, C. J. Peete, and B. W. Cooper public housing developments under HOPE VI, even as tens of thousands of Black residents remained displaced by the flood. The essays under this city hold the record of both displacements and of the organizing groups that persist: the Claiborne Avenue History Project, the Lafitte Greenway, and the residents who have sued, organized, and testified for the right to return.