Slavery to Gentrification on New Orleans Streetcars

FAIN: FB-52800-06

Michael Jack Mizell-Nelson
University of New Orleans (New Orleans, LA 70148-0001)

Stemming from my PhD dissertation, my manuscript surveys racial practices before, during, and after the Jim Crow period in order to explain how race relations on one city's transit system functioned and changed over more than 150 years. Race in Transit applies theories of whiteness, performance, and public space to archival evidence and my interviews with dozens of former transit employees and passengers in examining how transit served and continues to serve as a battleground for urban democracy. Both everyday exchanges and periods of intense racial violence on New Orleans’ streetcars, from before the Civil War, through the Civil Rights movement, and into the late twentieth century era of gentrification are addressed.