The Claiborne Avenue History Project

https://www.frenchquarterjournal.com/archives/louis-armstrongs-halloween-visit-concert-new-orleans-1965?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ2GUdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEea4w_DJG53jdf4Y6lhBS1tXScKFlVDzfTgaCFBpjLdRFcO65VYqS5zI547NQ_aem_UtBMqkGEV9eXpmQolelHOg

Louis Armstrong’s Halloween Magic: How a Ten-Hour Visit to his Hometown Conjured up Change Ten years after Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws led Armstrong to swear off performing in New Orleans, a committee from the city’s nascent jazz museum convinced him to return for a ground-breaking concert – one that helped pave the way for change. – by Bethany Ewald Bultman

Tonight is St. Joseph's Night, so it's time again for one of our favorite archival images: St. Joseph's Night at the Gypsy Tea Room in 1940.

The Black Masking Indian tribe in this photo is unidentified, but we assume they were based downtown; the Gypsy Tea Room was two blocks from North Claiborne, then a tree-lined promenade for downtown Indians (the Lafitte public housing development at Orleans and Claiborne was under construction at the time).

You'll notice that their suits are more or less flat. For decades now, the suits of many downtown tribes have featured three-dimensional elements, but that innovation came from Tootie Montana sometime after he started masking on his own in 1947. Before that, the prevailing style allowed for more movement.

The camera flash gives you a feel for how the sunlight would have played off of these suits on Mardi Gras Day (there were no Super Sundays in 1940, so Mardi Gras was your only chance to see these suits in the sun).

The photographer was Robert Tallant, a writer who documented the city as part of the WPA Writers Project. He was a native New Orleanian, but an outsider to local Black culture. You can sense a distance between the photographer and the people he photographed here, and see it in the way that two of the observers off to the left eyeTallant as opposed to the tribe lining up for the shot.

You can find more on St. Joseph's Night and the Gypsy Tea Room on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/gypsy-tea-room/

See you in the street!

📸 courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library

"The Georgetown 272: The Journey" tells the story of 272 enslaved people sold in New Orleans in 1838 and why it still matters to about 4,000 descendants.
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/documentary-explores-louisiana-slave-sale-that-saved-georgetown-university/289-219c1807-7b42-40ec-95bd-716e4dead057?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook_WWLTV

On this day, March 12, 1864, free Black leaders Jean Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau presented a petition to President Lincoln at the White House demanding voting rights for all American citizens, “whether born slave or free.” This moment is illustrative of Louisiana’s long arc of civil rights activism, long preceding the sit-ins and other demonstrations nearly a century later.

Mark Roudane writes, “Surrounded by the howling madness of the Civil War, two newspapers ignited a crusade for racial justice in the Crescent City that reached far beyond the state’s borders. This inspirational saga is chronicled in the pages of L’Union, the South’s first Black newspaper, and its successor, the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first Black daily. Eloquent and powerful voices are preserved in these journals, revealing accounts of profound resistance and achievement. It’s an extraordinary story, deeply woven into the fabric of Louisiana history.”

Read more here: https://64parishes.org/united-for-justice

About the image: Louis Charles Roudanez in 1857. HNOC

The intersection of Frenchmen Street and N. Claiborne Avenue has been named the "Jean Knight Honorary Intersection" by the New Orleans City Council. New signage should be up this spring.

Jean Knight, beloved around the world for the 1971 hit "Mr. Big Stuff," lived nearby on Frenchmen Street. The record made her career, though this photograph is from 1985, when she was back on the charts with her version of "My Toot Toot," another song in which the narrator makes clear that she is not to be messed with. Who do you think you are?

Incidentally, Knight's place at 1506 Frenchmen was a stone's throw from the childhood home of jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton at 1441 Frenchmen.

You can find more on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/frisco-records-office/

📸 by Bunny Matthews

MUSICAL LOUISIANA 2026:

ECHOES OF INNOVATION CONCERT

March 4, 2026, 7:30–9 p.m.

Concert: 7:30 p.m., St. Louis Cathedral (615 Pere Antoine Alley)

Preconcert Talk: 6 p.m., Williams Research Center (410 Chartres Street)

Free and open to the public
Treme's Petit Jazz Museum The Historic New Orleans Collection

Echoes of Innovation Our award-winning Musical Louisiana concert series returns with a celebration of 19th-century Creole composers and innovators, presented in partnership with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and Treme’s Petit Jazz Museum.

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of a glorious moment in the annals of rhythm and blues, and a perilous one for Charity Hospital, when Ernest Kador Jr. entered our mortal coil.

As biographer Ben Sandmel would later record, Ernie K-Doe offered this account of his birth: "On the second month, the twenty-second day, nineteen and thirty-six, eight-fifteen in the morning time, Charity Hospital went to rumblin' and a grumblin'! The building started to bendin', the walls started shakin', and the doctors said, 'What's wrong? What's happening?' The people told them doctors, 'A boy-child is being born on the third floor, at this particular time!' And I believe about that time the doctor had done finished what he had to do, and the nurses had done washed this beautiful body of mines down and brought it to my mother, and I believe my mother looked up at my father and said, 'Huh! What we gonna name the boy this morning?' And my father looked down at my mother and said, 'Hush! You can't name him nothin' but one thing, that's Ernie K-Doe Jr., and he's gonna be a bad motor scooter!'"

Happy birthday to the baddest motor scooter of them all!

You can find more about K-Doe on A Closer Walk: https://acloserwalknola.com/places/ernie-k-mother-law-lounge/

Sandmel's biography, which we implore you to read, is called Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans.

📸 courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Norman C. Francis, who shaped Xavier and New Orleans, dies at 94

The longtime university president was a key figure in the city’s civic, cultural and economic life. Friends and family praised the leader for how he treated others.

Josie Abugov
by JOSIE ABUGOV

February 18, 2026

Norman C. Francis, who shaped Xavier and New Orleans, dies at 94 Francis was a key figure in the city’s civic, cultural and economic life. Friends and family praised the leader for how he treated others.