![]() And that newfound sense of independence and long-hoped-for liberation was worth whatever it took to achieve - even if it meant uprooting your family, leaving relatives and lifelong friends behind and, for the most part, starting over from scratch. If you could afford it, you could pretty much do it in California. Enjoying the national parks, the museums and the theaters, and feeling safe as they traveled, stopping in whatever motel or hotel suited their fancy and their wallet. Stepping through the front door of a restaurant and being welcomed. Simple things, like going to the beach whenever they wanted to instead of only on specific days and between certain hours. ![]() Freedoms that they had never before experienced. This was the route, and likely the reason, for so many of the families that came to California from New Orleans and settled in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ‘60s. Eventually, we settled into a Spanish stucco in Leimert Park. The family moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Budlong Avenue south of Adams Boulevard. Six months after my father and uncle drove to Los Angeles in a rental truck full of furniture and appliances, my mom packed up the three kids and we boarded the Sunset Limited through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and got off at Union Station in Los Angeles. She closed up the beautiful yellow brick house that my father built for us on Eads Street, where we lived around the corner from her mother, down the street from my dad’s parents, and down the block from my dad’s grandmother and aunt. My mother, a Xavier University graduate with a degree in education, who was being groomed to become one of the first Black school administrators in the city, put her ambitions on hold. My father closed up Broyard Construction, sold his trucks and cement mixers, scaffolding and tools, and left behind the family business. As my mother said, “I’m not going to fight the Civil Rights Movement with my children’s lives.” They knew they could send their children to any school they selected and could afford, and that new opportunities awaited them professionally, if they just had the courage to leave behind the people they loved and make the 2,000-mile journey west, one-way, to California. My parents decided they were not willing to put their children through this. Picture Norman Rockwell’s 1964 painting “The Problem We All Live With,” depicting little Ruby Bridges walking between four federal marshals as she headed to William Frantz Elementary School, and you get the idea. Raphael Catholic School in the Gentilly neighborhood where we lived, my parents made a difficult decision.Īlready, throughout New Orleans and beyond, angry white citizens were in an uproar over the desegregation of schools, staging protests and even going so far as to follow Black children home from school and throw rocks, eggs and bricks at them. In 1961, as my brother was about to start first grade at St. In my own way, I proudly started life as an integrationist. According to my mother, as the result of a difficult pregnancy, I was the first “Negro” child born at Oschner Clinic, which at the time served only whites. This is the environment into which my brother, sister and I were born in the mid-to-late 1950s. The priest or deacon would walk the sacrament back to them in the rear of the church. They sat in the “Colored Only” section at Sunday Mass in Catholic churches throughout the city, only allowed to receive communion after the white parishioners did - and even then, not at the altar. ![]() My grandparents and parents told us many stories of living in New Orleans in the early- to mid-20th century: Sitting behind a moveable screen in the back of the streetcars and buses, climbing the stairs on the outside of the Saenger Theater to sit in the “buzzard’s roost” to watch a show, ordering food at Levada’s to-go from a window in the alley, as they were not allowed to walk through the front door of this and many other restaurants. Long after the Black Codes ended, segregation endured. In the old colonial days, there were restrictions in New Orleans that dictated and limited the behavior of both free Blacks, known as the “gens de couleur libre,” and the majority bound in chattel slavery.Ĭalled the “Code Noir” or “Black Codes,” these rules spelled out in detail where and when people of color could move about the city, conduct business, even recreate, the latter on Sunday only. The South was a challenging and dangerous environment in which to thrive for any person of color, even in New Orleans, one of the country’s most cosmopolitan seaport cities. ![]()
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