New Orleans has ever been a place for exiles and seekers: French aristocrats and frontiers folk; rebel slaves, defeated slave owners and mixed-race children of uncertain status; American explorers, Spanish merchants and Jewish refugees; prostitutes and nuns; musicians, artists, homosexuals, those seeking to rebuild an almost-drowned city and, more recently, transplants drawn by the city’s legendary funkiness.
Louisiana was well settled and cultivated by the time of European arrival. Contrary to the myth of hunter-gatherers living in a state of harmony with the forest, local Native Americans significantly transformed their environment with roads, trade networks and substantial infrastructure. They were, however, susceptible to European diseases; the germs brought by early explorers wiped out thousands of Native Americans. Ironically, by the time the French arrived with the goal of colonization, the region had probably reverted to something like a state of nature due to the massive deaths caused by introduced diseases.
After 1700, Europeans documented numerous direct contacts with local tribes. A confederation known collectively as the Muskogeans lived north of Lake Pontchartrain and occasionally settled along the banks of the Mississippi River. The Houma nation thrived in isolated coastal bayous from Terrebonne to Lafourche up until the 1940s, when oil exploration began in southern Louisiana and disturbed their way of life. Today, the Houma are battling the impacts of coastal erosion, which threatens the physical integrity of their tribal homeland.
Europeans knew control of the mouth of the Mississippi equaled control of the interior of the continent, but the Mississippi eluded ships on the Gulf until 1699, when Canadian-born Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and his younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, located the muddy outflow. They encamped 40 miles downriver from present-day New Orleans on the eve of Mardi Gras and, knowing their countrymen would be celebrating the pre-Lenten holiday, christened the small spit of land Pointe de Mardi Gras. With a Native American guide, Iberville and Bienville sailed upstream, noting the narrow portage to Lake Pontchartrain along Bayou St John in what would later become New Orleans.
Iberville died in 1706, but Bienville remained in Louisiana to found Nouvelle Orléans – named in honor of the Duc d’Orléans (Duke of Orléans) – in 1718. Bienville chose a patch of relatively high ground beside the Bayou St John, which connected the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain, thereby offering more direct access to the Gulf of Mexico. Factoring in the site’s strategic position, Bienville’s party decided to overlook the hazards of perennial flooding and mosquito-borne diseases. Engineer Adrien de Pauger’s severe grid plan, drawn in 1722, still delineates the French Quarter today.
From the start, the objective was to populate Louisiana and make a productive commercial port, but Bienville’s original group of 30 ex-convicts, six carpenters and four Canadians struggled against floods and yellow-fever epidemics. The colony, in the meantime, was promoted as heaven on earth to unsuspecting French, Germans and Swiss, who began arriving in New Orleans by the shipload. To augment these numbers, convicts and prostitutes were freed from French jails if they agreed to relocate to Louisiana.
In a secret treaty, one year before the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) ended, France handed the unprofitable Louisiana Territory to King Charles III of Spain in return for being an ally in its war against England. But the ‘Frenchness’ of New Orleans was little affected for the duration of Spain’s control. Spain sent only a small garrison and few financial resources. The main enduring impact left by the Spanish was the architecture of the Quarter. After fires decimated the French Quarter in 1788 and 1794, much of it was rebuilt by the Spanish. Consequently, the quaint Old Quarter with plastered facades that we know today is not French, as its name would suggest, but predominantly Spanish in style.
The Spanish sensed they might eventually have to fight the expansion-minded Americans to retain control of the lower Mississippi. So they jumped at Napoleon Bonaparte’s offer to retake control of Louisiana in 1800.
The Creoles could only loosely be defined as being of French descent. The progeny of unions between French Creoles and Native Americans or blacks also considered themselves Creole. Still, while the multicultural stew’s constituent parts were not necessarily French, they became French in character after exposure to the city. Early German immigrants, for example, frequently Gallicized their names and spoke French within a generation.
Ironically the group that did not assimilate to the French city was the French Acadians. The Acadians (forest-dwellers), former residents of Canada, were deported by the British from Nova Scotia in 1755 after refusing to pledge allegiance to England. Aboard unseaworthy ships they headed south, but the largely illiterate, Catholic peasants were unwanted in the American colonies. Francophile New Orleans seemed a natural home, but even here the citified Creoles regarded them as country trash. So the Acadians, now dubbing themselves Cajuns, fanned out into the upland prairies of western Louisiana, where they were able to resume their lifestyle of raising livestock.
Other former-French subjects arrived from St Domingue (now Haiti). The slave revolt there in 1791 established St Domingue as the second independent nation in the Americas and first black republic in the world. Following those revolts, thousands of slaveholders fled with their ‘property’ (slaves) to Louisiana, where slave and master bolstered French-speaking Creole traditions. Thousands of former slaves also relocated from St Domingue to New Orleans as free people of color. This influx doubled the city’s population and injected an indelible trace of Caribbean culture that remains in evidence to this day. Their most obvious contribution was the practice of voodoo, which became popular in New Orleans during the 19th century.
As the Civil War approached, nearly half of the city’s population was foreign born. Most were from Ireland, Germany or France. The Irish, in particular, took grueling, often hazardous work building levees and digging canals. They settled the low-rent sector between the Garden District and the docks, still known as the Irish Channel.
Despite the Napoleonic Code’s mandate for Jewish expulsion, trade practices led to tolerance of Jewish merchants. Alsatian Jews augmented the small Jewish community in New Orleans, and by 1828 they had established a synagogue. Judah Touro, whose estate was valued at $4 million upon his death in 1854, funded orphanages and hospitals that would serve Jews and Christians alike.
While Napoleon Bonaparte was waging war in Europe, the US was expanding westward into the Ohio River Valley. Napoleon needed cash to finance his wars, and US President Thomas Jefferson coveted control of the Mississippi. The deal seemed natural, but nevertheless the US minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, was astonished by Bonaparte’s offer to sell Louisiana Territory – an act that would double the USA’s national domain – at a price of $15 million.
Little cheer arose from the Creole community, who figured the Americans’ Protestant beliefs, support for English common law and puritan work ethic jarred with the Catholic Creole way of life. In 1808 the territorial legislature sought to preserve Creole culture by adopting elements of Spanish and French law, a legacy that has uniquely persisted in Louisiana to this day, to the abiding frustration of many a Tulane law student.
New Orleans grew quickly under US control, becoming the fourth-wealthiest city in the world and the second-largest port in the USA by the 1830s. The city’s population grew as well, and spilled beyond the borders of the French Quarter. Also in the 1830s, Samuel Jarvis Peters bought plantation land upriver from the French Quarter to build a distinctly American section.
The late 1850s saw the revival of Carnival. The old Creole tradition, now propelled by Americans who wanted to both appropriate and expand on the festival, hit the streets of New Orleans as a much grander affair than ever before. Americans also assumed control of the municipal government in 1852, further illustrating the erosion of Creole influence in New Orleans.
From the beginning, people of African and Caribbean descent have been an important part of New Orleans’ population and culture. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people were part of many New Orleans households. Equally significant, though, was the city’s considerable number of blacks who were free – though not given equal rights to whites – during the colonial and antebellum period.
Long before the Civil War, New Orleans had the South’s largest population of free blacks. In Creole New Orleans they were known as les gens de couleur libre, or free people of color. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not uncommon for slaves, or the children of enslaved people and slave owners, to be granted their freedom. Enslaved people who learned a trade were often allowed to hire themselves out and earn enough money to buy their freedom. In 1724, French Louisianans adopted the Code Noir (Black Code), a document that restricted the social position of blacks, but also addressed some of the needs of slaves (abused slaves could legally sue their masters) and accorded certain privileges to free persons of color. The Code Noir permitted free blacks to own property and conduct business.
Free blacks often identified with Creole culture, speaking French and attending Mass. Orchestras of free black musicians regularly performed at opulent Creole balls. Free blacks in New Orleans were often well educated, and some owned land and slaves of their own. But they didn’t share all the rights and privileges of white Creoles and Americans: they could not vote or serve in juries, and while going about their business were sometimes required to show identification in order to prove that they were free.
Subtle gradations of color led to a complex class structure in which those with the least African blood tended to enjoy the greatest privileges (octoroons, for instance, who were in theory one-eighth black, rated higher than quadroons, who were one-quarter black).
Read the above and you might think that blacks in Creole Louisiana were better off than those in other parts of the United States. To a degree, this was true, but a more brutal reality persisted: New Orleans was built on slavery.
The French brought some 1300 African slaves to New Orleans in the city’s first decade. Although the import of slaves became illegal in the USA in 1808, slavery itself remained legal, and thanks to smugglers like Jean Lafitte, New Orleans had become the largest slave-trading center in the country by the mid-19th century.
The reason? Enslaved people could still be traded within the USA. Sitting at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans became the capital of the domestic slave trade, which was seminal to the local economy. Riverboats were designed to accommodate a maximal amount of human cargo. Insurance policies were created to cover slaves. Slave traders were considered integral to the city’s financial sector, and became the wealthiest men in the South. Newspapers of the day were filled with classifieds that listed slaves for sale or sought escapees.
At no point was that trade humane, although, at least for a period, enslaved people in French and Spanish Louisiana were allowed to retain more of their African culture than slaves in other parts of the USA. Drumming and dancing were permitted during nonworking hours, and free blacks and slaves were allowed to congregate at Congo Sq, initially called Place des Negres. Immense crowds, including tourists from the East Coast and Europe, showed up to witness complicated polyrhythmic drumming and dances.
Still, enslaved people were ultimately considered less than human. Even a ‘kind’ master would split up an enslaved family with the same ease as selling livestock. The industry was a point of pride for New Orleanians; the slave market held in the gorgeous rotunda of the St Louis Hotel was even considered an attraction. Postcards were sold showing the St Louis’ lobby with the slave auction operating at a full clip. In 1960, the Omni Royal Orleans was built on the former site of the St Louis Hotel.
As cosmopolitan as New Orleans was, it was also a slave city in a slave state, and it was over this very issue that the nation hurtled toward civil war. On January 26, 1861, Louisiana became the sixth state to secede from the Union, and on March 21 the state joined the Confederacy – but not for long. The Union captured New Orleans in April 1862 and held it till the end of the war.
Major Benjamin Butler, nicknamed ‘Beast,’ oversaw a strict occupation, but is also credited with giving the Quarter a much-needed clean-up, building orphanages, improving the school system and putting thousands of unemployed – both white and black – to work. But he didn’t stay in New Orleans long enough to implement Abraham Lincoln’s plans for ‘reconstructing’ the city. Those plans, blueprints for the Reconstruction of the South that followed the war, went into effect in December 1863, a year after Butler returned to the North.
The ‘Free State of Louisiana,’ which included only occupied parts of the state, was re-admitted to the Union in 1862. Slavery was abolished and the right to vote was extended to select blacks. But the move to extend suffrage to all black men, in 1863, sparked a bloody riot that ended with 36 casualties. All but two were black.
At the war’s end, Louisiana’s state constitution was redrawn. Full suffrage was granted to blacks, but denied to former Confederate soldiers and rebel sympathizers. Blacks used the vote to challenge discrimination laws, such as those forbidding them from riding ‘white’ streetcars, and racial skirmishes regularly flared up around town.
In the 1870s, the White League was formed with the twin purposes of ousting what it considered to be an ‘Africanized’ government (elected in part by new black voters) and ridding the state government of Northerners and Reconstructionists. By all appearances, the White League was arming itself for an all-out war. Police attempted to block a shipment of guns in 1874, and after an ensuing ‘battle’ – in reality, a lynching of black police officers by a White League militia – the Reconstructionist governor William Pitt Kellogg was ousted from office for five days. Federal troops entered the city to restore order, but the ‘Battle of Liberty Place,’ as the lynchers called it, had already been mythologized by supremacists.
Although Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, New Orleans remained at war with itself for many decades afterwards. Many of the civil liberties that blacks gained after the Civil War were reversed by what became known as Jim Crow law, which reinforced and increased segregation and inequality between blacks and whites.
At the turn of the 19th century, monuments to the Confederacy began to be built around the city. They were a message, literally wrought in stone, to the city’s black residents: the white power structure of the city had returned, and had no intention of relinquishing its grip.
As the 20th century dawned, manufacturing, shipping, trade and banking all resumed, but New Orleans did not enjoy the prosperity of its antebellum period. Nonetheless, the era was a formative period: this was when the city morphed from an industrial port into a cultural beacon.
A new musical style was brewing in the city. Called ‘jass’ and later jazz, the music wed black Creole musicianship to African American rhythms. It also benefited from a proliferation of brass and wind instruments that accompanied the emergence of marching bands during the war years. As jazz spread worldwide, the music became a signature of New Orleans, much as impressionist painting had become synonymous with Paris.
In the 1930s oil companies began dredging canals and laying a massive pipe infrastructure throughout the bayou region to the southwest of New Orleans. The project brought a new source of wealth to New Orleans’ CBD, where national oil companies opened their offices, but not without significant environmental impact.
The demographics of the city were changing. During the ‘white flight’ years, chiefly after WWII, black residents moved out of the rural South and into the cities of the North as well as Southern cities such as New Orleans. Desegregation laws finally brought an end to Jim Crow legislation, but traditions shaped by racism were not so easily reversed. In 1960, as schools were desegregated, federal marshals had to escort black schoolchildren to their classrooms to protect them from white protestors.
Most whites responded to integration by relocating to suburbs such as Metairie and the Northshore (Slidell, Mandeville, Covington and other towns). Their children were plucked from public schools and enrolled in private academies; the tragic irony is that formerly all-white public schools became nearly all black.
New Orleans’ cityscape also changed during the postwar years. A new elevated freeway was constructed above Claiborne Ave and ran through black neighborhoods, largely so white citizens who fled town after desegregation could commute to work easily. The side effect of placing a highway through a major African American commercial district was not hard to predict: businesses shuttered, the economy suffered, and the income gap widened and deepened.
That doesn’t mean development was placed on hold during the 1970s. High-rise office buildings and hotels shot up around the CBD, and in the mid-1970s the Louisiana Superdome opened.
In 1978 New Orleans elected its first black mayor, Ernest ‘Dutch’ Morial. Morial, a Democrat, appointed blacks and women to many city posts during his two terms in office, and was both loved and hated for his abrasive fights with the City Council. His tenure ended in 1986, and in 1994 his son, Marc Morial, was elected mayor and then re-elected in 1998. In 2001, the younger Morial attempted to pass a referendum permitting him to run for a third term, but the city electorate turned him down. Another African American, businessman Ray Nagin, became mayor in 2002, serving until 2010.
Occupying a low-lying, drained swamp that sits on a hurricane-prone coast, New Orleans has long lived in fear of the one powerful storm that could wipe out the city. On the morning of Saturday August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina prepared to lay claim to that title. The storm had just cut a path of destruction across Florida – killing seven people – when it spilled into the warm Gulf of Mexico. It quickly recharged from its trip across land, and morphed from a dangerous Category Three storm into a Category Five monster, the deadliest designation on the Saffir-Simpson Scale of hurricane strength. Computer models predicted a direct hit on New Orleans.
Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation, the first in the city’s history. Four out of five residents left the greater New Orleans area. Nearly 200,000 stayed behind. The holdouts included those who could not find transportation, people who thought the predictions too dire, and those who wanted to protect their homes and stores from looters.
The storm weakened to a Category Three before making landfall near the Louisiana–Mississippi line just before midnight. As the sun rose Monday morning, it was clear Katrina’s winds had caused extensive damage – blowing out windows, tearing large sections of the Superdome’s roof, and knocking over trees and telephone poles. Yet a sense that it could have been much worse prevailed.
But while house-flattening winds are the most reported feature of hurricanes, in this case the most deadly aspect was the storm surge, the rising tide of water driven inland by the gales. Katrina’s winds pushed water from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River, into Lake Pontchartrain and through the canals that lace the city. The levees built to protect the city did not hold. A torrent of water from the Industrial Canal washed away the Lower Ninth Ward; in neighborhoods such as Lakeview and Gentilly, houses were submerged when the 17th St and London Ave Canals gave way.
In all, four-fifths of the city was submerged in a toxic soup of salt and fresh water, gasoline, chemicals, human waste and floating bodies. The massive pumps that clear the city after rainy days couldn’t process the volume of water, which rose as high as 15ft in parts of the city, and remained for weeks. Stranded residents found little time to escape. They moved from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, then the attic. Some drowned there; those lucky enough to find tools to hack through the roof got out, or used cans of paint to dash out crude appeals for help.
Pundits, geophysicists and even then–House Speaker Dennis Hastert (who claimed that rebuilding a city that lies below sea level ‘doesn’t make sense to me,’ before backtracking) seriously debated writing off New Orleans as a lost cause. The city, they said, was – by dint of its geography – not worth rebuilding.
Yet millions of Americans and thousands of New Orleanians rose to the challenge. They waded into basements in 100°F-plus weather and slopped out trash, rubble and corpses; they mowed lawns, planted gardens and fixed each other’s roofs, sometimes using discarded pieces of swept-away flooring. They celebrated small victories with what beer they could scrape together, and these impromptu parties became their own building blocks of reconstruction, the cultural component of rebirth in a city where enjoying life is as integral as cement.
By 2010, new restaurants and bars were popping up with happy frequency, and the arts scene in particular has turned the town into something of a Southern Left Bank for the 21st century. Young entrepreneurs, attracted by low rents and the city’s undeniable culture, are flooding into the city. When the Saints, the local NFL franchise, won the Superbowl in 2010 during Carnival season, the city collectively lost its mind. There was no happier place on Earth.
Determination to reconstruct, a flourishing in the food and arts worlds, and the winning of the Superbowl is the bright side of the rebuilding story. The other perspective? Well, that requires some background on the relationship between New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. The former, since the 1970s, has been largely African American and liberal; the latter, in terms of politics, increasingly conservative.
Many New Orleanian institutions were lost post-Katrina, but of particular note are Charity Hospital, a public teaching hospital, and the city’s public school system.
Charity Hospital was replaced by the modern, multi-block LSU Health Center New Orleans. The public school system has already been shuttered; former Orleans Parish public schools have been replaced by a charter school system (charter schools receive public funding but operate independently of a local school board). A lottery system determines placement in local charters. Teachers were replaced by young, often white individuals enrolled in programs like Teach for America.
Many felt all of the above was an attack on the city’s black population, a way of using a weather-related disaster to further the political goal of stomping out public schools and hospitals. The opposing view was that the above institutions were seriously compromised even before Katrina and in serious need of reform. How one feels on these issues can spark some very contentious debate in New Orleans; while it is true that the public schools, for example, had enormous performance issues, was this attributable to teaching quality or centuries of structural inequality or a combination of both factors? Either way, Charity and the school system were largely staffed by (and served) African Americans, and the loss of these two institutions gutted the local African American middle class.
New Orleans is one of the worst cities for income inequality in the country – a Bloomberg study named it the second most fiscally unequal city in the USA. The mansions of St Charles Ave truly feel a universe removed from blocks in St Roch and New Orleans East where children grow into Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome while lacking basic literacy skills. This fundamental chasm in living standards remains a baked-in obstacle to civic optimism, even in a city known for celebration. The situation is exacerbated by infrastructure that still, a decade after Katrina, floods in the event of heavy rain.
And yet: New Orleans parties on. In a sense, it has to. New York has to do business. Washington DC must do politics. Los Angeles lives by entertainment. New Orleans finds ways to enjoy itself, and make you enjoy life. And there is some holdout for hope. The city celebrates its 300th birthday in 2018, and some believe a round number is in and of itself an impetus for change. Indeed, in 2017, the monuments of white Confederate slave holders – those unambiguous statements of white supremacy erected in the public sphere – were finally (and literally) taken off of their pedestals. Not long after, Latoya Cantrell, a city council member who began her political career as a Broadmoor neighborhood activist, was elected the first female mayor of New Orleans.
Timeline
Pre-European Contact
Louisiana is populated by thousands of members of the First Nations, who live in villages and large towns in the Gulf Coast region and northern prairies.
1600s
European explorers search for the entrance to the Mississippi River. Control of this access point would provide command of the interior of the North American continent.
1690s
French fur traders establish small villages and forts in the south Louisiana bayous, paving the way for the eventual settlement of New Orleans.
1718
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founds Nouvelle Orléans, favoring the site for its strategic position controlling the mouth of the Mississippi River.
1750s
French Cajuns begin to arrive in southern Louisiana following the British conquest of Canada. The area they settle becomes known as (and is still referred to as) Acadiana.
1762
France hands Louisiana Territory, which has proven to be unprofitable, over to Spain in exchange for an alliance in its wars in Europe.
1788
On Good Friday, the Great New Orleans fire destroys 856 buildings, which are replaced with Spanish-style construction that characterizes the French Quarter to this day.
1791
Following the slave revolution in Haiti, the arrival of French-speaking migrants, black and white, doubles New Orleans’ population and adds a veneer of Caribbean culture.
1803
Napoleon reclaims Louisiana, then sells the territory – which encompasses almost the entire drainage area of the Mississippi River – to the US for $15 million, doubling the nation’s size.
1811
The German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in US history, occurs near New Orleans. Two white men and 95 slaves are killed during the fighting.
1815
General Andrew Jackson defeats the British in Chalmette, just outside the city, at the battle of New Orleans. The battle occurs after the War of 1812 has technically ended.
1820s
New Orleans becomes the second-largest immigrant hub in the USA. Many immigrants come from Germany and Ireland; those from Ireland often settle in the area now known as the ‘Irish Channel.’
1828
The first synagogue in the city opens for services. New Orleans Jews are a mixture of Spanish, Alsatian and Germanic groups, giving the community a unique cultural makeup.
1830s
Marie Laveau markets herself as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, popularizing the religion among the upper class and linking it to the city’s public identity.
1840
Antoine’s opens for business. It is still open today, the oldest family restaurant in America, and its kitchen is supposedly responsible for dishes such as oysters Rockefeller.
1853
A yellow-fever epidemic claims the lives of almost 8000 citizens, or 10% of the city’s population. Eventually the outbreak is traced to mosquito-borne transmission.
1857
The Mistick Krewe of Comus launches modern Mardi Gras with a torch-lit night parade. Eventually, hundreds of other ‘krewes’ will add their imprint to the celebration.
1860s
French instruction in New Orleans schools is abolished in 1862. A statewide ban on French education is implemented in 1868, limiting French cultural influence.
1862
New Orleans is occupied by the Union for the duration of the Civil War. Many citizens resent the Northern presence, setting the stage for a difficult postwar reconstruction period.
1870s
The ‘White League’ is formed in post–Civil War years as an often-violent backlash against the election of black politicians and the presence of Northern government officials.
1880s
Mardi Gras ‘Indians’ appear – black New Orleanians dressed in stylized Native American costume, a supposedly respectful nod to Indian tribes that resisted white conquest.
1895–1905
Buddy Bolden, who will eventually go insane and die in relative obscurity, reigns as the first ‘King of Jazz.’ His music influences generations of performers.
1896
Homer Plessy, an octoroon (one-eighth black), challenges New Orleans’ segregation laws. Subsequently, discrimination remains legal under the ‘separate but equal’ clause.
1897
Storyville, New Orleans’ infamous red-light district, is established. The music played in the best ‘clubs’ helps popularize jazz with out-of-town visitors (ie customers).
1901
Louis Armstrong is born on August 4. He will go on to reform school and a storied career, becoming one of New Orleans’ most famous musical icons.
1917
The Department of the Navy shuts down Storyville – the red-light district – despite the protests of Mayor Martin Behrman.
1927
During the Great Mississippi Flood, the levee is dynamited in St Bernard Parish, flooding poorer residents’ homes to divert water and protect the wealthy in New Orleans.
1936
Vieux Carré Commission is founded to regulate changes to French Quarter exteriors. The Quarter is now one of the oldest preserved neighborhoods in the USA.
1960
Federal marshals escort black children into desegregated schools. In the following years, ‘white flight’ into the suburbs will leave city schools with few white students.
1965
Hurricane Betsy, the billion-dollar hurricane, batters the Big Easy. Improvements to the levee system made following the disaster fail to protect the city in 2005.
1970
Jazz Fest is held for the first time, beginning its long history as a gathering of a few hundred fans celebrating the city’s unique musical heritage.
1978
New Orleans’ first black mayor, Ernest ‘Dutch’ Morial, is elected. Despite lingering racial tensions, a dynasty is established: his son, Marc Morial, is elected mayor in 1994 and ‘98.
2002
Long-shot Ray Nagin becomes mayor of New Orleans. Nagin vows to clean up the city, but his term in office has its share of scandals.
2005
The storm surge following Hurricane Katrina floods 80% of New Orleans. The city is evacuated, although thousands who could not or did not leave linger in the city for days.
Feb–Mar 2010
The Saints win the Superbowl, Mardi Gras happens and Mitch Landrieu is elected mayor, the first white mayor to win a broad portion of the black vote.
Apr–Sept 2010
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill pumps 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, becoming the largest, costliest environmental disaster in American history.
2011
The census reveals the population of New Orleans has shrunk by 29% since 2000. A corresponding increase in population is noted in some suburbs.
2014–15
The city of New Orleans begins enforcing a noise ordinance and passes a smoking ban; both moves create considerable outcry on either side of the issue.
2017
A year before its 300th anniversary, New Orleans takes down four prominent Confederate monuments and elects Latoya Cantrell as its first female mayor.