This archive report was first published on 27 August 2019.
On the streets of New Orleans in 2019, one can feel the echoes of 1837, when The Picayune, precursor to The Times-Picayune, first hit the streets ( first issue ). The city was then a melting pot of cultures, with the arrival of Anglos following the Louisiana Purchase and statehood in 1812. The Creole population and the newcomers clashed over language, customs, and racial policies.
The Picayune, as a pro-American newspaper, sided with the newcomers, often at the expense of the city's unique culture. In the 19th century, New Orleans was a city of rich, multiracial traditions, including its music, gastronomy, and other cultural expressions. However, The Picayune either ignored or pilloried these traditions, which were borne out of the relatively mild racism of the French and Spanish colonial periods.
These traditions allowed the town to develop a vibrant, politically active, partially free black middle class. The city's cultural expressions often transcended race, as they still do today. However, The Picayune's staff members, like Dorothy Dix, repeatedly denigrated the role of 'Negro mammies' in the development of Creole cuisine, as exemplified by Leah Chase and her teachers.
Even jazz, the emblematic sound of New Orleans, was disowned by The Times-Picayune in a 1918 column, stating, 'We do not recognize the honor of parenthood,' and 'where it has crept in we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it.'
Ashton Phelps, a former managing director of the Picayune and a veteran of the White League, which attacked the city's interracial Republican Metropolitan Police at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1872, effectively putting an end to Reconstruction in Louisiana.
In a 1993 mea culpa, The Times-Picayune admitted to perpetuating racist attitudes, portraying black people as intellectually and morally inferior. However, by the time David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and former state congressman, made the runoff in Louisiana's 1991 race for governor, The Times-Picayune was his most powerful critic, publishing devastating articles that laid bare his history.
