Orleans News

End Renaming the Streets Now


Precisely what are we to commemorate on June 19, our latest federal vacation?

Juneteenth, the poetic contraction of the date that provides the vacation its identify, was initially celebrated largely amongst black Texans as a commemoration of that day in 1865 when information of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation reached individuals enslaved within the southern a part of their state. 

Civil rights lawyer Loli Edward Elie. If a really useful street-name change is enacted, Lolis Edward Elie Road would run via the French Quarter and Faubourg Treme, rather than the road now named Gov. Nicholls. (Picture by Gediyon Kifle)

For many years, Opal Lee, the 97-year-old “grandmother of Juneteenth,” fought to have the date acknowledged as a federal vacation. In 2021 President Joe Biden made it official. Earlier this 12 months, he awarded Ms. Lee a Medal of Honor to acknowledge her function.

“Juneteenth is a day of profound, profound weight and energy to recollect the unique sin of slavery and the extraordinary capability to emerge from probably the most painful moments with a greater imaginative and prescient of ourselves,” Biden stated. “Ms. Opal Lee made it her mission to make historical past, not erase it. And we’re a greater nation due to you, Opal. Thanks.”

That it took two-and-a-half years for information of the Emancipation Proclamation to succeed in individuals enslaved in southern Texas and one other 156 years for the nation to take official word of this injustice is a becoming metaphor for all Individuals who’ve suffered the outrageous fortune of justice delayed. Ladies, who needed to wait till 1920, when the nineteenth Modification granted them suffrage, can declare a sort of kinship to the Juneteenth vacation. So can Japanese Individuals who waited greater than 4 many years for the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to acknowledge the “grave injustice” and grant them reparations for the evils of their internment throughout World Conflict II. So can homosexual Individuals who needed to wait till a Supreme Court docket ruling in 2015 for the suitable to marry the particular person of their selection.

These belated acknowledgements of previous American injustices are a sort of rewriting of our historical past. Not the details of it, however the interpretation of it. 

Gov. Nicholls Road was named for Francis T. Nicholls, a Accomplice basic and Louisiana governor. (Picture by La’Shance Perry for The Lens)

As a New Orleanian, the Juneteenth vacation is a reminder to me of a latest, and to this point largely failed, try and reinterpret our historical past. “On June 18, 2020, the New Orleans Metropolis Council accredited Movement M-20-170, authored by Councilmembers Kristin Gisleson Palmer and Jay H. Banks to ascertain the Metropolis Council Road Renaming Fee, an advisory committee to contemplate renaming sure streets, parks and public locations in New Orleans that honor white supremacists.”

Within the roughly three years because the fee issued its advice, a few half dozen of the instructed streets have been renamed. The town council has didn’t take any motion on the overwhelming majority of the suggestions of its personal fee. 


Lolis Edward Elie via the years. On proper, with fellow civil rights fighter, the Rev. Avery Alexander. (Prime left picture taken by Ingrid Hertfelder. )

There will definitely be Juneteenth commemorations in New Orleans, however I concern that they are going to be generic celebrations of emancipation quite than particular occasions associated to the historical past of slavery and the post-slavery struggles right here in New Orleans. 

If the heroes of New Orleans tradition and freedom will not be commemorated right here, the place will they be remembered? 

Herman Midlo funded the Midlo Heart on the College of New Orleans particularly for the examine of our metropolis and native heroes. Individuals like Juan San Malo, who helped lead a maroon group of escaped slaves within the 1700s; Elanora Peete, who in 1918 based the Home Employees Union, which represented the pursuits of a big swath of black working girls; Rodolphe Desdunes, whose ebook “Nos Hommes et Nos Histoire” — “Our Individuals, Our Historical past” — was one of many few accounts of the efforts of black individuals within the 1800s to supply training and voting rights to all New Orlenians. 

Every of those individuals are being thought-about for the consideration of getting a road named after them. Every is worthy. 

Very similar to the official Juneteenth vacation, the renaming of those streets would symbolize a reinterpretation of our historical past. 

Whereas no present motion may undo the stench that our metropolis’s white supremacists bequeathed to us, eradicating their names from locations of honor could be an affirmative assertion that their values will not be our personal. It could be a method of disassociating ourselves from New Orleanians and others whose legacies are finest disdained and discarded. 

Which leaves us with a query: What does the failure to behave on the suggestions of the renaming fee imply for our metropolis?


From left: the creator, Lolis Eric Elie, his father Lolis Edward Elie, and his shopper turn out to be pal, civil rights fighter Rudy Lombard. (Picture by Gediyon Kifle)

I’m greater than a disinterested social gathering on this matter. The fee proposed that my father’s identify be amongst these thought-about to interchange a present road identify. If this modification is enacted, “Lolis Edward Elie” could be the identify given to the road operating via the French Quarter and Faubourg Treme, rather than the identify “Gov. Nicholls,” a Accomplice basic who was elected governor of Louisiana after Reconstruction.

Gov. Nicholls Road on the nook of Marais Road, throughout from the retail house that was Ciaccio’s Meals Retailer, recognized to Treme neighbors as “Chaci’s.” (Picture by La’Shance Perry / The Lens)

My father knew all the span of Gov. Nicholls, from the Quarter to its endpoint at North Broad Road. For a lot of my childhood, my father lived at 715 Gov. Nicholls St. within the upstairs half of a home owned by James Dombrowski, the Christian socialist minister who labored with the organizers of the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott and whose 1965 Supreme Court docket case basically struck down Louisiana’s Subversive Actions and Communist Entrance Management Regulation. 

Later, when my father moved to Faubourg Treme, he by no means lived greater than a block away from Gov. Nicholls Road.

My father engaged in civil rights work reluctantly at first, preferring to focus his then-fledgling authorized profession on the purpose of supporting his younger household. However Rudy Lombard, an early chair of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose identify can also be being thought-about for a road renaming, requested my father if he would symbolize the scholars planning sit-ins at segregated lunch counters on Canal Road. My father recruited his pal Jack Nelson to symbolize the demonstrators earlier than changing into immersed within the motion himself. 

A 1986 mayoral marketing campaign poster for Rudy Lombard. In 1969, Lombard, an early chair of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Lombard requested Lolis Edward Elie to symbolize the scholars planning sit-ins at segregated lunch counters on Canal Road. The Metropolis Council’s fee has additionally really useful {that a} road be named for Lombard.

The road re-naming suggestions additionally included my dad’s former shopper, his expensive pal Rudy Lombard, whose civil-rights work advanced a number of instances, main him to turn out to be a meals historian; an creator of the 1976 Claiborne Design Group examine that reenvisioned Claiborne Avenue and surrounding corridors; a 1986 candidate for mayor of New Orleans; and a transferring power behind the Neighborhood Growth Basis. 

Jack Nelson’s identify can also be being thought-about for a road. 

At my father’s funeral, retired Legal Court docket Decide Calvin Johnson fondly remembers the brave efforts my father made in defending him and several other different teenaged civil rights demonstrators in Plaquemines, Johnson’s hometown. A long time after the very fact, the 2 males had what amounted to a two-line comedy routine. “You misplaced my case!” Decide Johnson complained. “You by no means paid me!” my father retorted. 

My father was pleased with the truth that he continued his efforts on behalf of racial equality lengthy after the Nineteen Sixties. In one among his most well-known efforts, he and a crew of attorneys secured acquittals for members of the Black Panther Social gathering accused of the tried homicide of cops within the Want public housing venture.

Over a lifetime, his work was a part of a decided effort to make sure that the beliefs and legal guidelines of the USA Structure could be upheld in Louisiana. 

These beliefs are far bigger than anybody man and the council’s failure to behave is an affront, not a lot to me and my household, however to the very notion of the beliefs the council ought to maintain expensive.

Optimally, the council would have acted on the suggestions of its fee with all deliberate velocity. Having failed that check, the Juneteenth vacation ought to function a reminder that the council ought to nonetheless act. And it ought to act now. 

Lolis Eric Elie is a former board member of The Lens and a former columnist for The Occasions-Picayune.


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