Abstract
This research reads New Orleans’s North Claiborne’s 22-block landscape through a Du Boisian cartographic analytic that traces the ground rhythms of white supremacy and the syncopating daily life of Blacks residents’ resistance to racial oppression. Drawing on Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro as well as his work of speculative fiction, The Princess Steel, and cartographic experiments for the 1900 Paris World Exposition, and through textual and visual analyses of this critical Black geography, I argue that Du Boisian spatial analytics continue to be critical to how Black futures and freedom might be imagined. This Du Boisian analytic tends to archival and canonical absences; insists on the temporal, relational, and geographical dimensions of white supremacy; challenges the flattening of racial classificatory systems and cartographic logics; and represents heterogeneity as a rich and complex genealogical intermix of resistance across time and space. By reading North Claiborne for its geographical and temporal synergies, I draw on Du Bois to empirically grapple with and represent a capacious Black geographical imaginary and grounded praxis that blurs geographical and temporal delineations, contrasts white supremacy with freedom as a geographical praxis, and transposes abstract cartographies with Black life and placemaking.
Introduction: Syncopation
We are constantly challenging the common to be ground. Much like we endlessly debate rights and laws around the constitution and its meanings. Americans are unpredictable. American musicians syncopate. We play around with the two-beat groove by accenting off the beat and coming back to it at unexpected times. . .. Syncopation is playing a rhythm on the opposite side of the beat. . .. the daring application of dexterity, jocularity, and timing to challenge the common grid, the common way of doing things, the accepted way. It is the masterful challenging of convention. – Wynton Marsalis
1
In his series of lectures given at Harvard between 2011 and 2014, New Orleans trumpeter Wynton Marsalis notes that syncopation, which is a disruption of the two-beat groove, is a “challenge to the common grid.” By disrupting the metronomic ground rhythm of the two-beat groove by placing the emphasis on the offbeat of an “unyielding reference point,” jazz makes space for improvisation to “make freedom work” in the American context. 2 Through improvisation, jazz puts “opposites together” (Marsalis 2019), syncretizing African polyrhythms, blues, and ragtime into its own generative form (Gioia 2011) that has supported and sustained musical heritage and generational lineages of the sort that Marsalis himself comes from. New Orleans’s Buddy Bolden, one of the earliest musicians in New Orleans to draw together already existing lineages of church music, marching traditions, and the sounds of the street, shaped this new admix, or what Marsalis calls a way of conversing through “democratic discourse.” 3 This discourse takes place over generations (Okiji 2017) and “on the spot” (Jazz at Lincoln Center 2018) through what Calmore (1991:2133) calls “ensemble improvisations.”
Thinking spatially, the ground from which jazz emerged was the post-Reconstruction American South, a world in which the shifting metronomic ground of white supremacy was taking new spatial and regulatory forms. More specifically, jazz’s emergence from the streets of New Orleans in the 1890s played against the emergent formations of Jim Crow segregation while it also elongated and pulled the beat of Black residents’ resistance to and improvisations against the spatial logics of white supremacy. Louisiana’s efforts to legally codify racial segregation in the 1890s (State of Louisiana 1890) and Black residents’ resistance to these laws, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s pivotal Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 (Supreme Court of the United States 1896), were the substantive backdrop to jazz’s emergent intermixes of sounds.
Both the emergence of jazz and the Plessy decision were confluent with W. E. B. Du Bois’s ([1899] 1996) study of Black Philadelphia. Unprecedented in its methodological and empirical scope, Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996) illuminated the multiple dimensions, cartographic configurations, and relationality of Black life in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward in the late 19th century. Simultaneously straight forward and nuanced, The Philadelphia Negro continues to be instrumental for understanding both the spatial and relational logics of racialized oppression and the geographical and temporal worlds of Black placemaking (Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams 2017) that “challenge the common grid” of white supremacy.
In this article, I argue for a Du Boisian spatial analytic as critical to encountering Black futures in the present urban geography. Focusing on the historical and analytical capaciousness and the methodological and cartographic possibilities of Du Bois’s empirical work in The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996), fictional work in The Princess Steel (2015), and graphic work from the 1900 Paris Exposition, I engage with an analytic that can simultaneously diagnose the continued annotation, thickening and mutations of the color line while also drawing on jazz polyrhythms and syncopations to counter etch geographical mutuality and Black placemaking as the always-present possibility of abolition and freedom.
This article reads the originating landscape of jazz, New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue, over time through Du Boisian cartographic and data frameworks (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018; Du Bois [1899] 1996; Hunter and Robinson 2018), historical analyses and contemporary fieldwork that center a multitude of Black geographic imaginations. Drawing on work with the Claiborne Avenue History Project (CAHP), I explore the generative world of geographical improvisation that refutes and challenges the common grid of racially oppressive classificatory systems and segregation in this southern American city. 4 Further, through textual and visual analyses that scale and connect critical Black sites in the 1890s to regenerative spatial praxes in the 21st century, I draw a constellation of the multiple foundations from which Black futurity is premised and can be scaled along the North Claiborne corridor.
In the following section, I contextualize Du Bois’s text as a historical ground for urban sociology, noting that while scholars are increasingly drawing on Du Bois’s work, his spatial grounding of race remains undertheorized and underutilized. I then draw on Du Bois for his analytical foundations, bringing space into the methods themselves as a way of thinking about Black geographical formations. Next, I read North Claiborne Avenue and its constellation of homes, businesses, and open space through a Du Boisian analytic where both text and graphics examine North Claiborne as a capacious site that refutes conditioning by a white spatial imaginary (Lipsitz 2011). Finally, in my discussion I engage with the reparative and reconstructive possibilities of a Du Boisian jazz analytic and discuss the ways that image making and representational discourse can preclude the ground rhythms of white supremacy and (re)present Black futurity based on a historically grounded yet future-leaning syncopation—an imaginary and genealogy of freedom.
Literature Review
Du Bois as Historical and Spatial Ground
Du Bois’s investigations of the 7th Ward began in 1896. Over 2 years, Du Bois meticulously analyzed the 7th Ward and its residents’ demographics, education, employment, health, familial configurations, social organizations, crime rates, built environment, political organizing, and their enduring experiences of color prejudice and racism. Published 22 years later, The Philadelphia Negro moves between detailed analyses of house-to-house surveys to more general inquiries regarding the district and its relational context within Philadelphia’s shifting racial geography. Du Bois’s examination of the 7th Ward’s built and social environment tracks, as he notes, the reasons for concentrations of Black life in certain areas due to racist practices of exclusion that touched upon employment, public education, income, and living conditions.
While urban scholars have long engaged with Du Bois’s work, including The Philadelphia Negro, mainstream sociology has, until relatively recently, all but ignored Du Bois’s critical contributions to sociological inquiry (Morris 2015; Wright 2020; Wright and Morris 2021). As Morris (2015) and Wright (2020) argue, the sociological canon once centered on the Chicago School as the originating school of sociology. Both scholars have importantly positioned Du Bois’s empirical engagement of the social construction of race in contrast to white social scientists’ beliefs in and empirical assumptions of Blacks’ cultural and biological inferiority. Further, Morris (2015) and Wright (2010), as well as Dantzler, Korver-Glenn, and Howell; Itzigsohn and Brown (2020); Loughran (2015); and Burawoy (2021), have centered Du Bois’s empirical and theoretical heft, particularly his empirical contributions to understanding the connections between race and place and the centrality of racism in urbanization processes.
While this scholarship critically centers Du Bois within the sociological cannon and supports renewed engagement with Du Bois’s work, as a text for urban planning, Du Bois, in general, and The Philadelphia Negro, specifically, remain under-engaged but also under-critiqued for the anti-Blackness found in some of The Philadelphia Negro’s analytical and interpretive structure. For instance, Du Bois’s extensive characterizations of Black criminality and poverty not only do little to situate such conditions and activities within much deeper terrains of racism, they also reify the types of overly-generalized characterizations and demonization of Black residents, thus dangerously lending such analyses to policymaking where such conditions and descriptive techniques are equated with the whole of Black geographies and therefore used to justify removal and disinvestment.
Scholars, particularly Black geographies scholars, have continued Du Bois’s intellectual traditions through work that conceptually, theoretically and empirically connects racial processes to the geographical unevenness of anti-Blackness and white supremacy (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Hackworth 2021; Lipsitz 2011; McKittrick 2006; McKittrick and Woods 2007). Recent engagement with Du Bois highlights how his work can contribute to our understanding of this unevenness as it is linked to environmental crises (Carrera 2023; Foote and de Leon 2023; Liévanos 2023; McCreary and Milligan 2021) and gentrification (Hackworth 2021; Rucks-Ahidiana 2022). Another vein of scholarship challenges urban sociology’s “deficit framework” (Binkovitz 2022), by highlighting Black placemaking (Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams 2017; Heitz 2024; Hunter et al. 2016; Hunter and Robinson 2018), citymaking (Hunter 2013), and resistance (Noxolo 2022; Brand 2018; Brand, Inwood, and Alderman 2022) and the global import of Du Bois’s work (Kelley 1999; Moore and Joudah 2022).
As a historical, empirical analysis of the everyday lives of Black residents, The Philadelphia Negro refutes the generalized absence of Black life in the archive by detailing a “geographic genealogy” (McKittrick 2006) of the vastness and multifaceted diversity of Black residents making life amidst the shifting, cumulative and adaptive praxes of white supremacy at the turn of the century (Hunter 2013; Katz and Sugrue 1998). Further, as Boddie and Hillier (2022) and Hunter (2015) note, The Philadelphia Negro’s analysis of everyday life challenged the presumed homogeneity of Black communities and the denigrating presumptions of racial inferiority that permeated sociological studies at the time (Morris 2015). Finally, by insisting on the inherently geographical construction of race, Du Bois’s text engages the deep relationality of racial geographies (Lipsitz 2011).
Importantly, these contributions extend Du Bois’s work by challenging the continued aspatiality of much of urban sociology. The interlocking dimensions of racial exclusion and inequality, as detailed in Du Bois’s 7th Ward, provides an important geographical meter for understanding how racial landscapes were reforming during and in the years following Reconstruction. This meter provides a critical account of the emergent post-Emancipation ground rhythm of white supremacy, thereby contextualizing the magnitude of its continued impacts.
Du Bois as Analytical and Representational Ground
At the time, Du Bois’s work was unparalleled in locating the problem of the color line centrally on white supremacy and deciphering how U.S. landscapes are imbricated in racial processes. Indeed, The Philadelphia Negro is never outside of race, never beyond its scope or scale or the capacious and geographically relational workings of white supremacy. As an analytical ground, The Philadelphia Negro insists on the spatiality of race and freedom and Du Bois grapples with how empiricism can make plain (p. 5) the “threatening intricacy” and geographical capaciousness of racism within and “far beyond the slum districts” (p. 6). Du Bois’s thick descriptions and contextualization of Black life speak to an array of white supremacist geographical logics and praxes that span every facet and temporal condition of urban life. His analytical approach to studying the truth of a “plainly manifest” problem of the color line enhances the study’s scientific reliability, thus offering paths toward “practical reform” (Du Bois [1899] 1996:3–6).
Scholars who have focused on Du Bois’s methodological contributions have noted that Du Bois sought to “accumulate knowledge about Black people from the group’s perspective, emphasizing individual agency from a subaltern positionality and pushing back against the speculative and racist theorizing about Blacks common to social science at the turn of the twentieth century” (Conwell and Loughran 2023:2; see also Bobo 2015; Hunter 2013; Wright 2020). In terms of the breadth of his empirical work, Conwell and Lougrhan (2023) note that Du Bois’s “level of comprehensiveness speaks to his insistence on seeing a Black community in its totality” (p. 10). Both Morris (2015) and Itzigsohn and Brown (2020) argue that Du Bois’s empirical work, which combined quantitative and qualitative research, placed structural racism at the center and Wright (2020), in particular, demonstrates how Du Bois’s empirical rigor countered the subjective and racist underpinnings of white sociology. Comparative, interpretive, and inter-categorical (see Conwell and Loughran’s 2023:12–13 discussion of McCall 2005), Du Bois’s quantitative analyses and thick descriptions (Garcia, López, and Vélez 2018) of the impacts of racism and class difference within and across community institutions acutely diagnose internal and external racial formations, which scholars such as Omi and Winant (2015) have continued to elaborate.
This analytical ground richly tracks the conditions of Black life while also contextualizing them within larger geographies and the active yet sedimenting (Brand 2022) geographical practices of white supremacy (see also Wright 2020). By detailing the factors shaping Black residents’ segregation into the 7th Ward and experiences of racism, Du Bois turns a rich empiricism often wielded against those who experience racism (McKittrick and Woods 2007; Wright 2020) onto those who inflict it while also carefully attending to the ways that Black life exists outside of plantation logics (Hunter 2013; McKittrick 2013). In his insistence that racism shapes places where Blacks are imagined to be free, Du Bois annotates how race jumps geographical conduits: how it shifts in scale and category and how it works relationally across varying geographies and experiences of inclusion and exclusion. From the shut doors, to hemmed-in neighborhoods, to elevated rents, residents in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward experienced race in and outside of their community.
Du Bois’s historiography of the simple yet devastating and intricate fact of race methodologically underpins continued empirical analyses of the persistent geographical grounding of white supremacy (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Lipsitz 2011; Pulido 2015)—how the color line is maintained and worked forward through varying logics of capital accumulation, exploitation and oppression. This work critically demonstrates the relational and multi-scaled nature of white supremacy across geographies and therefore challenges the “as is” and seeming neutrality and normalization of racialized geographical difference (Harris 2004). As Omi and Winant (2015) and Feagin (2013) have shown, white supremacy and race shift over time, whether through dominant frameworks (Bonilla-Silva 2006, see also 2015) or through environmental (Pulido 2000, 2016) and/or geographical political projects (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Moore and Joudah 2022). Yet when Du Bois undertook his research, at the advent of Jim Crow and new forms of legally codified racial segregation, this approach was indeed novel.
Though relationality in The Philadelphia Negro focuses on the context of Philadelphia at the turn of the century, Du Bois’s insights provide a methodological ground for more complex comparative work (Hunter 2013) that can track the temporal and geographical scales and relational grounding and properties of race. Here, I suggest that Du Bois’s speculative fiction, The Princess Steel (2015), written between 1908 and 1910, pairs with The Philadelphia Negro as an analytical framework to track the longue durée of racism.
As Brown and Rusert (Du Bois et al. 2015) note in their introduction to the republication of The Princess Steel, Du Bois “used fiction to test out and amplify his developing philosophical and sociological positions over the many decades” (819). In The Princess Steel, sociologist Professor Hannibal Johnson demonstrates his invention, the megascope, which allegorically depicts the “great near”—the historical arc of racial capitalism that gives shape to the present (Du Bois et al. 2015:820, 823–24). Empirically, Professor Johnson’s megascope plots the breadth of singular human deeds of the “Great Chronicle” of life onto a two-dimensional plane and then curves these planes “about one center” onto a sphere, which is then “hampered by curious counter-curves and shadows and crossings” that denote the “Captains of Industry” “who today are guiding the world events and dominating the lives of men” (Du Bois et al. 2015:823). As Brown and Rusert (Du Bois et al., 2015:820) note, Du Bois’s megascope situates the present “in a narrative of historical colonization. . .viewing slavery through the lens of primitive accumulation. . ..to narrate the epic tale of historical materialism.” In this article, I draw on The Princess Steel’s critiques of sociological knowledge-making, whose “present empiricism [Du Bois] deemed less able to make the longue durée of capitalist conquest visible” (Du Bois et al. 2015:820). This text provides a metaphorical framework for empirical analyses that track the fuller array of racially grounded practices as accumulations and assemblages that cross geographical and temporal scales. The imagery created with my analysis of North Claiborne takes its cue from The Princess Steel’s imagery and works to make visible how these accumulations and assemblages sit together in the landscape (see Images 2–4).
Finally, reading Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro text and maps with his cartographic and illustrative work detailing Black life for the 1900 Paris Exposition (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018), expands the analytical import of his work, while also illuminating some of its key limitations. Du Bois’s hand-drawn maps of the 7th Ward in The Philadelphia Negro annotate class diversity, racial demographics, and general land use categories. While Du Bois’s maps importantly categorize the multiplicity of Black inhabitance, they overly rely on simple categorizations more in line with socioeconomic stratifications and static depictions not unlike those later wielded against Black communities through racialized urban development policies like redlining and urban renewal (see Image 1). For instance, Du Bois’s cartographic depiction of the “vicious and criminal classes” reifies a reductive, positivist description of Black communities which, as McKittrick and Woods (2007) argue about many analyses of Black life, can “be read as naturalizing racial difference in place” and therefore reducing “black lives to essential measurable facts rather than presenting communities that have struggled, resisted, and significantly contributed to the production of space” (p. 6).
The Seventh Ward of Philadelphia: The Distribution of Negro Inhabitants Throughout the Ward, and their social condition, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1899 (portion of the map).
In this regard, Woods’s (1998) blues epistemology challenges Du Bois’s more static classificatory mapping that, while detailing heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, reinscribes stratified categorizations more in line with the hierarchy that Woods calls the “plantation classificatory grid” (p. 29). In contrast, Woods’s blues epistemology details “a self-referential classificatory grid” characterized by a “distinct and evolving complex of social explanation and social action” whose praxis “provided support for the myriad traditions of resistance, affirmation and confirmation” (p. 29). Woods’s (2017) analyses of New Orleans’s blues epistemology demonstrate the intricate entanglement of political and geographical resistance and jazz’s socio-spatial visions for freedom. Woods’s understanding of Black life amidst the terrains of white supremacy thus advances Du Bois’s (2017) limited cartographic and descriptive depictions by centering Blues praxes as critiques of white supremacy and visions for freedom and democracy (see in particular Woods’s discussion of Buddy Bolden). The imagery created with my analysis of North Claiborne thus also takes its cue from Woods’ blues epistemology by centering Black place-making as a counter to white supremacist cartographic logics (see Images 2–4).
Dynamic Geographical Presence and Black Life on North Claiborne Avenue, Mixed-Media Collage, Anna Livia Brand, 2024.
Refuting and Resisting The Line of Color, Mixed-Media Collage, Anna Livia Brand, 2024.
Constellating Mutuality, Mixed-Media Collage, Anna Livia Brand, 2024.
Du Bois later deepened his visual analyses through his exploration of “the problem of the color line” (which he later expands in The Souls of Black Folk ((1903) 2015) through a series of infographics and visualizations detailing the international expanse of slavery and its manifestations and impacts in Georgia. As Mabel Wilson notes, Du Bois’s work at the 1900 Paris Exposition makes plain how “racism was a wound in the body politic that continued to fester amid widespread racial segregation” (Wilson in Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018:39). This further development of Du Bois’s empirical focus on racism “redeployed the Western methods of cartography that had been used to marginalize and exploit black life by inscribing the black world into history and geography” (Wilson in Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018:42).
While many of the visualizations descriptively annotate the whereness, whatness, and “as is” of Black life, many of them also carry additional empirical weight, contextualizing white supremacy’s magnitude. Further, the cartographic approach Du Bois and his team utilized speaks to the complex and layered impacts of racism and demonstrates the power of visual work to not only reinforce raw data but to increase its impact. For instance, in his chart documenting “Slaves and Free Negroes” between 1790 and 1870, Du Bois and his team use red and black color fields to delineate the shifting population line between the free and enslaved in a “tensely arranged visual” designed for “maximum impact” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018:70).
The Philadelphia Negro, read with The Princess Steel and Du Bois’s work for the 1900 Paris Exposition, offers an empirical and representational lens for grappling with the fuller expanse and depth of white supremacy as a shape-shifting, multi-scaled, and relational geographical practice. Taking a Du Boisian approach to understanding racialized accumulation, privilege, property, and development, we can, from this ground, direct questions as to how the color line is maintained, shifted, and saturated over time and space, up to the present day.
Data and Methods
This article draws on archival research and contemporary fieldwork in New Orleans between 2005 and the present. My research in and along North Claiborne includes interviews, participant observation, and professional planning work with residents, community activists, and professional planners in community-led and city-led post-Katrina planning and community development efforts.
Further, the centrality of North Claiborne to Black New Orleans provides a rich living archive of materials and empirical sources. More specifically, I rely on both digital and physical archival records at Tulane University’s Amistad Research Center and the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, Xavier University’s archive of The New Orleans Crusader, The Historic New Orleans Collection, the City of New Orleans, the Orleans Parish Assessor, the New Orleans Public Library, the Louisiana Digital Library, and the Library of Congress. These materials include documents (personal papers, photographs, and pamphlets/brochures) from former residents, Tremé and 7th Ward oral histories, archival photographs of North Claiborne, and the Haines Criss Cross Street Directories between 1930 and 1970. Oral histories, photographs, and personal papers complemented the creation of the North Claiborne database, which was constructed in partnership with CAHP.
Additionally, I draw on community-led planning and redevelopment efforts dating from the 1970s and post-Katrina, including neighborhood-scale plans, development, and policy recommendations. Further, CAHP’s own oral history work and my own fieldwork in New Orleans, conducted primarily between 2005 and 2006 and then between 2011 and 2012, and my conversations with residents, activists, and community leaders during community planning meetings and events, helped me to understand the critical sense of place along North Claiborne Avenue for former and current residents, business owners, and activists. Additionally, I drew on U.S. Census data, including the decennial census (1790–2020) and the American Community Survey (1-year estimates).
Analytically, I created and analyzed a North Claiborne database and then analyzed the types of businesses, residential patterns, and land uses along the corridor each decade between 1890 and 1970 and in the 2000s. Using this analysis, I identified archival sources that could complement and annotate the database (including photographs, oral histories, community and residents’ documents and papers, historical Black newspapers, and the U.S. Census) beyond their enumerative qualities. This work was done in partnership with CAHP to support CAHP’s public memory work.
Analysis: Ground Rhythms And Syncopations Along New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue
North Claiborne Avenue was the spine of New Orleans’s Tremé and the 7th Ward neighborhoods. This Black geography arcs back to and from an 18th-century plantation to its creation by Free People of Color and Black Creoles during enslavement and after Emancipation. By the time of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, Black New Orleanians had created and recreated a Black geographical world along North Claiborne outside of and segregated from white New Orleans. This world had supported the emergence of jazz, Black political organizing, and Black placemaking through its dense intermix of homes and businesses, sidewalks, and stoops. Indeed, the Black spatial imaginary (Lipsitz 2011) that existed in and along North Claiborne has been shaped and reshaped in retrospective (Okiji 2017) and forward-leaning (Claiborne Avenue Design Team 1976) genealogies over generations. While North Claiborne’s more recent lives include mid-20th-century urban disinvestment, clearance, and highway construction and 21st-century post-disaster gentrification, this corridor remains a vital site for understanding the conflicted, multiple, and possible landscapes of race and freedom.
In this section, I draw on the array of data and analyses detailed above and my reading of Du Bois’s work to engage with New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue. I thickly read and caption North Claiborne within the context of the larger racial processes at work in New Orleans and the American South. I offer analyses that, while not exhaustive, begin to detail a Du Boisian jazz analytic that can (1) tend to archival and canonical absences; (2) insist on the temporal, relational, and geographical dimensions of whiteness; (3) challenge the flattening of racial classifications; and (4) (re)present heterogeneity as a rich and complex genealogical intermix of resistance across time and space.
Each textual analysis is paired with a graphic analysis, thus combining and building on Du Bois’s work to both delineate and visualize race. By reading North Claiborne for its geographical and temporal synergies, including sites located off but operating in confluence with the Avenue, I draw on Du Bois to frame and represent a capacious Black geographical imaginary and grounded praxis that (1) blurs geographical and temporal delineations and land use categorizations; (2) contrasts the geographical logics of race and freedom; and (3) transposes abstract cartographies with Black life and placemaking.
One: Dynamic Presence
Just years after the first slave ship arrived to New Orleans in 1719, Charles Antoine de Morand, employed by the Company of the Indies, purchased the property on the Indigenous land that would become Tremé. Morand built a plantation, establishing the city’s first brick yard on Bayou Road (now Governor Nichols Street) just off of what is now North Claiborne Avenue (Debrunner 1798; Osbey 2022). The enslaved living on Morand’s plantation mined the batture mud along the Mississippi for the clay that they molded and fired into the soft red bricks used to pave the city’s streets and build the piers raising the city’s houses off the sodden ground. The majority of the plantation, later owned by Claude Tremé, was subdivided by the end of the 18th century. When the area was incorporated in 1812, the remainder of the land was subdivided and sold, mostly to free Black men and women (Osbey 2022).
“For more than one hundred years, the Faubourg Tremé expanded and prospered under the direction of Black men and women who were preeminent in the economic, agricultural, cultural, military, social and cultural life and development of the Faubourg and the city; and many of the families now residing in Faubourg Tremé are the direct descendants of those early enslaved and free laborers, merchants, tradespeople and landowners” (Osbey 2022: n.p.).
As a “haven for Free Blacks” (Osbey 2022: n.p.), Tremé and the 7th Ward, between 1812 and 1896, were a landscape that literally and metaphorically defied the established and shifting ground rhythms of white supremacy. Free People of Color and Black Creoles, the carpenters, plasterers, and masonry workers who owned property and mutually built the fabric of the neighborhood, helped establish this ground for Black residents by the 1850s (City of New Orleans, Historic District Landmarks Commission 2011). Much of this landscape remains. Creole cottages from the 1830s, townhouses from the 1840s, and shotgun houses from the 1880s and 1890s still constitute much of the historic fabric of the neighborhood (City of New Orleans, Historic District Landmarks Commission 2011). As the area grew and as Black residents continued to buy property and build their homes, they also built the business core of North Claiborne Avenue.
North Claiborne appears on maps of the city as early as the 1820s. In the 1850s, a double allée of live oak trees was planted down North Claiborne’s wide neutral ground. By 1892, when Homer Plessy stepped onto the railcar to protest racial segregation, North Claiborne and its adjoining neighborhoods were saturated with private residences and Black-owned businesses that supported nearly every dimension of daily life, including pharmacies, life insurance agencies, groceries, clubs and bars, barbers and beauty salons, bike and hat shops, and theaters.
This daily array of destinations was a shifting landscape, with businesses moving and changing across the decades leading up to the 1960s construction of the I-10 expressway over the Avenue’s neutral ground. This array is remarkable both for its continuities and its flux. For instance, LaBranche Pharmacy, on the 700 block at the corner of North Claiborne and Basin Street, stood steadfast as the Arbor Flower Shop, just doors away, gave way to the Two Sisters Beauty Shoppe between the 1930s and 1940s. The building that housed the LA Industrial Life Insurance Company in the 1940s then housed Almenia’s Lunch Room in the 1950s and Gosserand Superior Printers by the 1960s. The property that houses LaBranche Pharmacy is now an intergenerational Black family-owned plant store, Crazy Plant Bae, with an Airbnb upstairs that publicizes its history as a historic structure, built in 1855, where Dr. Emile J. LaBranche opened his Black-owned pharmacy in 1907.
This shifting dynamic of Black presence in a built environment of properties owned, built, and nurtured by Black residents contests a static reading of Black space. North Claiborne’s 1500 blocks exemplify this dynamic. Reading the 1500s from west to east, what was once Big Mary’s No. 2 in the 1970s became Ernie K-Doh’s Mother-in-Law Lounge in 1995 and is now Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge. Just doors down at 1512, the Hi-Li Social Club in 1940 became Lucille & Thelma’s Beauty Shop by 1950. From 1924, the Standard Industrial Life Insurance Company stood steady at 1530, and its sign still hangs out front. Levata’s Oyster Restaurant in 1548, well documented by CAHP’s oral history work for having the best oysters (Beaman n.d.-a), also remained steady over the decades. Across the street, what was primarily residential in the 1950s and 1960s included the Micelli Grocery Store, which became the Circle Department Store in the 1950, and the Pink Palace Bar in the 1960s. Properties that house an attorney’s and doctor’s office and the 1950s Club Fifteen became Sydney’s Lounge and private residences by the 1960s. While much of these blocks were demolished in the 1960s to make way for I-10, the 1500 blocks still terminate at Circle Foods (formerly St. Bernard Market), a neighborhood staple grocery store.
Image 2 explores the dynamic geographical presence of Black life in the North Claiborne corridor. Coupling racial demographic shifts with the spatial and cultural dimensions of inhabitance, this figure draws on a series of Du Bois’s graphics: (1) his hand-drawn maps of the 7th Ward in The Philadelphia Negro and (2) his 1900 Paris Expo charts and data visualizations, including “Valuation of Town and City Property Owned by Georgia Negroes,” “The Proportion of Freemen and Slaves Among American Negroes,” “The Amalgamation of the White and Black elements of the population in the United States,” and “Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018: Plates 21, 51, 54 & 31). Over a base layer of the 1883 Robinson Atlas of the North Claiborne area, the collaged image depicts a stacked area graph documenting New Orleans’s changing racial demographic between 1721 and 2021 (total white population is shown in light brown, total Black population is shown in dark blue, and total enslaved population shown in green). As indicated, New Orleans’s Black population has grown steadily, far outpacing white population growth until the rapid loss of the city’s Black population after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. By 1970, Black residents made up the majority of the city. In many neighborhoods, including the areas adjacent to the North Claiborne corridor, this demographic shift to a Black majority far preceded the city-wide shift.
By the time that we have census tract level data for Orleans Parish in 1940, the Black presence and growth in the North Claiborne area outpaced that of whites, whose population decline in this area accelerated rapidly between 1960 and 1970 and then again between 1970 and 1980. A second line chart (overlaying the stacked area chart) shows the shifting racial demographics for areas adjacent to the North Claiborne corridor between 1940 and 2022 (total Black population shown in dark blue and total white population shown in light brown). As shown in this line chart, this area has become increasingly majority Black since at least the 1940s. Importantly, this line chart shows the growth in the area’s white population since Hurricane Katrina, which has more than doubled from pre-Katrina numbers (238% increase), and the coterminous decline in the Black population (-54%). The shifting demographics are not merely due to population loss of Hurricane Katrina, but to a rapid loss in affordable housing, a rise in Airbnb rentals, and an overall rise in property values in the area and across the city. Set against the city’s post-Katrina Black population loss (nearly 120,000 residents), the post-Katrina demographic shifts at these two geographical and temporal scales demonstrate the racialized pivot that has ensued since Katrina.
The intent of Image 2 is to counter the over-representation of and enumerative focus on loss by presencing an intermix of life and history. Image 2 puts a series of maps depicting the Morand/Tremé plantation lines and the Mississippi River batture in conversation with archival and contemporary images of North Claiborne dating back to the 1940s, including images of LaBranche and the Standard Industrial Life Insurance Company properties in the 1940s and the present. Images include daily life: a boy on a bicycle, two women walking down the street, moments of gathering, second lines, and jazz funerals, life that made up the intermix of resistance and the backbone of jazz. The historical time periods annotated above the graphs draw on Du Bois’s annotations of the “disquieting socioeconomic and political trends” that link “the economic progress of Black Georgians to larger regimes of violence against African Americans” and illuminate the “widespread disenfranchisement and dispossession of black people in the post-Reconstruction era” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 2018:80).
Image 2 takes its cue from Du Bois’s maps and his empirical work challenging denigration and homogenization. It grapples with archival absence by annotating a dynamic Black presence against statistical analyses. The images complement and complicate the data represented in a typical graph, depicting population growth and decline by insisting on Black inhabitance across the many lives of North Claiborne as opposed to sheer enumerations of Black life. The images themselves are not represented linearly across time. Instead, they are layered and blended both in perspective and via flat collage so that recent images sit adjacent to and intermix with archival images, and thus challenge any reading of the city, and of this corridor in particular, as static or devoid of Black geographical presence.
Two: The Line of Color
The Philadelphia Negro was undertaken at a critical point in the post-Reconstruction U.S. Just months before Du Bois began his investigations of the 7th Ward, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered their decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which sanctioned a state’s rights to racially segregate and enforce the color line, the baseline of property configurations and processes. Though The Philadelphia Negro was written concurrently with the Plessy decision, the world Du Bois depicts is one shaped by a shifting and saturating color line across the U.S. As Harris (1993) notes, “Plessy arose at a time of acute crisis for Blacks” (p. 1746) and that, with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, it marked an “important transition from old to new forms of whiteness as property” (p. 1714).
Homer Plessy, who refused to move from his seat in a whites only train car in contestation of Louisiana’s Separate Car Act (1890), lived on the 1100 block of North Claiborne Avenue (Brand 2023; Medley 2012) just off Ursulines Street. The Comité des Citoyens, the political organization with which Plessy organized against racial segregation, was constituted by residents who lived around the North Claiborne corridor. Its members went to school at Straight Business School, whose boarding house and dining hall were located on the 1400 block of North Claiborne; published the Crusader, a Black Republican newspaper focused on racial inequality and segregation; and were deeply involved in local social and benevolent organizations, such as the Société d’Economie at d’Assistance Mutuelle (Economy and Mutual Aid Association) (Shaik 2021), which was located just three blocks off North Claiborne on Ursulines Street.
If The Philadelphia Negro demonstrates the geographical ground that the Plessy decision normalized, then the Plessy decision further coalesced and gave ground to a multitude of legal and extralegal racial segregation laws and practices, including racial zoning, racial convenants, and redlining (Silver 1997; Sugrue 1996), that simultaneously codified emergent legal and extralegal forms of propertied exclusion and violence and cemented, as Harris argues, whiteness as property. Plessy’s lawyer, Albion Tourgée, argued this point, noting that to be regarded as white is “most valuable sort of property, being the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity” (Tourgée, as quoted in Harris 1993:1748). Both ground and flux, this propertied interest in the color line would, in the wake of Plessy, become both solidified and transformed through multiple development regimes (Plotkin 2001; Santucci 2019; Seicshnaydre et al. 2018; Silver 1997), laying a ground that continues to shape the racial geographies of cities in the American North and South.
In New Orleans, the rise and codification of zoning and single use districts (City of New Orleans 1929, 1953) in the early 20th century reified the types of “plantation classificatory” (Woods 1998) systems codified in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision (Silver 1997) and later in the 1930s redlining maps that characterized and justified the area’s hazardous rating based on its Blackness. These restricted, single use districts, such as those implemented along North Claiborne and its adjoining neighborhoods in the 1920s and 1950s, downplayed the diversity of the area, reducing its rich intermix of businesses and residences to “acceptable” land uses along the corridor and throughout the neighborhoods. An extension of these racialized property regimes justified the city’s extensive clearance of private property in the 1930s – 1960s to make way for two public housing developments, the construction of I-10, and the construction of Armstrong Park. Though post-Katrina zoning changes allow for more diverse uses throughout the neighborhood, still limited are the types of everyday institutions like bars and clubs that support the cultural life of the community (City of New Orleans 2015).
The construction of I-10 above the neutral ground of North Claiborne resulted in the removal of 12 blocks of property. This included the 1100 block where Plessy lived as well as the south or river side of the 900-1000 blocks, which were cleared to make way for an off-ramp from the expressway above. This means that in a very short time, the community lost Wallace’s Bar & Lounge, Club Off Limits, Duffy’s Home Hardware, Broussard’s Barber Shop, Norman Smith Photography Studio, R & W Watch Repair, Three R’s Beauty Shop, Excel Finance, Club Fifty-Two, Jesse Mae’s Beauty Nook, Green Spot Restaurant, Conti Motors, Honey Hush Bar, Green O. Package Liquor Store & Bar, O K Furniture Store, Ernest Joubert Real Estate, M. Bass Hat Cleaners, De La Rose Brothers Shoe Repairing, Marjoy Beauty Salon, Duhe’s Steak House, Earl’s RX Pharmacy, Fat Man’s Restaurant & Lounge, Nite Cap Bar & Lounge, Elliot Boisdore Real Estate, Frisco Records, Blaise’s Barber Shop, and Mother’s Diner, as well as Acme, Progressive and Safety Industrial Life Insurance companies and nearly 50 residences.
While the loss of these businesses and residences was immediate, the continued presence of I-10 has further devalued properties along the corridor and led to increased public and environmental health concerns. Similarly, the construction of Armstrong Park not only removed over 350 private residences and businesses, it also closed off Congo Square, a critical Black gathering place, from the community with a series of parking lots and brick fences. While this inventory of homes and businesses cannot begin to enumerate what was lost with the construction of I-10, loss is not the only methodological framework for understanding North Claiborne, nor does the color line fully delineate geographic possibilities. In contrast to the static and racialized classificatory systems that link plantationism to the Plessy decision to zoning to redlining to property devaluation to I-10 to current waves of displacement and gentrification, and that normalize the “as is” of racial geographies, a map of the North Claiborne corridor read through a Du Boisian analytic is better read through the tensions that pull together Black geographic threads of life and rhythm that contest erasure and simple classification.
If anything, the North Claiborne spine both evidences and refutes the salience of the color line in New Orleans. Image 3 grapples with Du Bois’s analytical grounding of what Tourgée called “the line of color” by contrasting the geographical entanglements of white supremacist spatial logics with Black geographical praxes in and around North Claiborne.
The construction of Image 3 started with a stereograph of the live oak trees planted along North Claiborne in the 1850s (Rowles 1875). Using the stereograph’s two-sided frames, each side depicts one dimension of the accumulating and assembled geographies of white supremacy—valuation (to the left of the image) and devaluation (center of the image). The left most stereographic frame combines land use and redlining maps of North Claiborne with imagery from anti-desegregation protests in New Orleans. In the land use layer the built environment that shaped and gave place to political and cultural organizing in the late 1890s, from which the Comité des Citoyens and Homer Plessy organized (depicted through the 1896 Sanborn map), contrasts with the built environment today, revealing the stark loss of properties along the corridor. The map was then inverted so that the current built environment reads in white.
The imagery layered on top of the land use model includes anti-desegregation protesters in New Orleans, highlighting specifically the presence of white women protesting desegregation as a means of protecting white schools and geographies. Also included is an image of the redlining map that supported further investment in white areas of the city (as indicated by green and blue ratings in the map). On top of this ground, a series of houses are individually placed above, as if not in relation to, this foundation.
While white spaces across the city have been both protected and valued, their counterparts, including areas adjoining the North Claiborne corridor, evidence how racial processes have hemmed in Black neighborhoods. Recent property values and geographies of whiteness across the city (Brand 2022) demonstrate how these dual systems of valuation and devaluation have further enabled an array of public and private infrastructures property and development investments that are anchored to whiteness through exclusive zoning. The color line dictates this relationship, as Du Bois made clear.
The second frame (in the middle of Image 3) collages together redlining maps and a series of drawings of single-shotgun homes and the I-10 infrastructure annotated by varying racialized policies that have maintained the color line. Here, colored, hazardous, blighted, dilapidated, unsafe, and auction are all terms used to justify erasure in the past and even in the wake of Katrina.
Finally, shifting right and outside of these two frames is a world made by and shaped by Black residents over the longue durée of racial processes along this corridor. This area of the image brings together layers of historical and contemporary images of North Claiborne’s built environment, live oak trees, the businesses cleared for I-10, jazz funerals, and second lines on a ground of the paving patterns at Congo Square. Here also the labeling of Black geographies as “hazardous” shifts to a layer designating these spaces as HOME to the Black community. Read together, Image 3 works with the color line in ways that both annotate its relational and geographical innerworkings and give presence to how North Claiborne and Black life in and along the Avenue resists and refutes it.
Three: Geographical Mutuality
While the empirical annotations informing Image 3 suggest, as Du Bois does in The Philadelphia Negro, that white supremacy constructs relational geographies, Image 4 focuses primarily on his call to annotate the intermixture of Black life beyond the color line. In New Orleans, this intermixture is characterized by the simultaneous rise of organizing against racial segregation and the emergence of jazz. Image 4 draws on empirical work to examine how Black geographies like North Claiborne work through geographical mutuality.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from 1896 illustrate the array of businesses during Plessy’s time, including wagon repair shops, drug stores, cistern shops, a cigar factory, clubs, and churches, and annotate their materiality of brick streets and building piers. By the 1930s, Plessy’s block consisted of the Acme Industrial Life Insurance Agency, Safety Industrial Life Insurance & Sick Benefits Association, Elite Pharmacy, and restaurants that had changed to cafes that had changed to bars. The block where Comité des Citoyens members might have dined at the Straight Business School also, at varying times, included the Musician’s Union Office Club (American Federation of Musicians, Local 496) (Beaman n.d.-b), the LA Life Insurance Company, Claiborne Hardware and Paint (which had moved from its previous location on the 1000 block), and Meine’s Garage, as well as beauty shops, dentist offices, life insurance agencies, flower shops, and realtors.
This array of daily destinations, as well as properties throughout the area housing and hosting the numerous Benevolent Societies and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which date back to the 1800s, formed the spine of political and musical praxis, placemaking, and inhabitance across the North Claiborne corridor. These dance and meeting halls, like Economy Hall, Perseverance Lodge No. 4, the Society of Inseparable Friends Hall, Equity Hall, Francs Amis Hall, and the Perseverance Society Hall, are the sites where mutual aid societies nurtured and gave literal and metaphorical space to political organizing and the emergence of jazz (Armagost 2012; Medley 2012; Beaman n.d.-b). The overlapping uses of public and private space for nurturing performance and political organizing, the array and intermix of these uses along the corridor and across the neighborhood fabric, and the shifting yet stable terrain of Black life defy the simple classificatory systems that were being reconstituted in Plessy’s time and into the early 20th century.
Combined with the shifts and continuities of the corridor from the 1930s to the present day, the life of North Claiborne over time reads less like a flat, static map and more like a constellation of mutual aid networks and nodes that cross generations. This is the mutual aid that gave rise to life and funeral insurance agencies that lined the corridor during racial segregation and that have continued to support community members in new ways and host the city’s second-line parades, which take place every Sunday from October through June (Johnson 2019). When Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, such as the Black Men of Labor, Tremé Sidewalk Steppers, Dumaine St. Ladies, and Money Wasters, host their annual second-line parades, they take up the street, weaving through and claiming public space in ways that reject the hemming in of Black geographical imaginaries (Dinerstein 2009; Regis 1999, 2001).
Like a backbeat, these emplaced living traditions support the continued lineage of cultural, musical, and political placemaking, giving rise to a way of thinking spatially that defies any form of static or classificatory cartography. While they stress a more nuanced understanding and way of valuing place (and property), they also fundamentally challenge the presumed individualism inscribed into and fortified through property and land use maps. A cartography of mutual aid works across geographical and temporal scales to make the connections that continue to give life to Black placemaking in and along this corridor.
Image 4 explores how the use overlaps and interstitial fabric of North Claiborne is best understood through how Black residents use(d) space in mutually constitutive ways. To represent how Claiborne is better understood through a cartography that can account for its retrospective mutuality, Image 4 was created in two layers. The first layer annotates the varying dimensions of white supremacist sediment (Brand 2022) and the ground rhythms of white supremacy through colonial, zoning and redlining maps, and images depicting loss and erasure, including urban renewal and highway construction. In this layer, the neighborhood is hemmed in by multiple forces of exclusion, property regimes, and developmental racism that codify the original plantation and property lines.
The second layer depicts different strata of Black placemaking, drawing on and intermixing archival and contemporary images of Black life and the built environment and elevating the importance of spaces such as sidewalks, the street, and a live oak shaded neutral ground. This layering of images that, like Images 2 and 3, defy traditional temporal and geographical scales and categories, work to visually place Black placemaking as a syncopation against the relentless ground rhythm of white supremacy.
Thus, the second layer draws its empirical focus from syncopation and mutuality to depict a rhythmic Black spatial praxis, drawing its inspiration from the praxis of inhabitance from second line parades. A series of second line routes through Tremé and the 7th Ward are graphically drawn to depict desire paths through the neighborhood. These desire paths are annotated not only for their directionality toward a set of critical sites (labeled over the property maps layered below), but as thick spaces, where Black residents inhabit the fullness of public space across the breadth of the street and sidewalk (see Dinerstein 2009). As the desire paths reach their varying destinations, a second logic is included: each site is drawn and represented as a circuit of genealogical spaces that draw on the memoried and present-day uses of these spaces. This haunting constellation includes spaces that are no longer in existence physically, but exist in residents’ memories and oral histories through CAHP’s memory work.
Further, the route lines are layered over one another and reference the maps below while also unflattening the map by drawing links between the built environment and second line images across time. For instance, a desired path is drawn from Economy Hall, which was located blocks south of Claiborne on Ursulines, back to the Musicians Union Hall on North Claiborne. As Shaik (2021) shows in her meticulous account of Economy Hall, the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuell, founded in 1836 and which built Economy Hall, demonstrated nearly a century of progressive political organizing, community support, and mutual aid preceding and supporting Plessy and the Comité des Citoyens’s organizing. The desired path linking Economy Hall not only geolocates this site but also works to challenge binaried representations of erasure and presence, memory, and dispossession.
The cartographic arrangements of this syncopation are drawn down and over the first layer, using critical sites and spatial praxes to refute the power and salience of the white supremacist ground. While the second layers of Image 4 syncopate against the first, the constellations of image and desire lines evoke Black traditions of using space as doubling, where residential spaces overlap with social uses, which overlap with business uses, blurring not only easy land use categorizations but also refuting a codifiable land use ethic. Further, Image 4 primarily grounds Black geographies as spaces constructed through retrospective improvisations that rest on a mutual and intergenerational genealogy of space.
Finally, Image 4 explores the syncopations of mutual aid through collage by assembling a series of social aid and pleasure clubs second lining and emplacing them within an array of historical and contemporary sites critical to the emergence of mutual aid and jazz. The collapse of time and space in the collage suggests a lineage between the past and the present, a syncopation against erasure and a literal touching down and layering of the genealogy of place and people. Here in the literal and metaphorical ground transformed through inhabiting space, through taking up space through a fullness that refutes simple classifications, Black residents fill the streets with a syncopating pull the threads through time and space.
Discussion: Drawing Freedoms
Now, for a brother to come from across the way. . .
When we play our drums we say un-na-nay.
Now I want you! You, you, you, you, and you over there!
To know we coming in peace and love from Congo Square!
-Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis
North Claiborne attests to the geographical capaciousness of Black political and social organizing and the recombinatory grounding of freedom through residents’ ensemble improvisations. Following Davis’s (2022:3) historiography of the “geographical circuits” and “intricate infrastructure of social networks” that made up the “long arc” of emancipatory movements and McKittrick’s (2006: xiv) framing of “oppositional spatial practices” that “signal alternative patterns that work alongside and across traditional geographies,” in this section I deal more specifically with genealogical inhabitance and haunting as a way of graphically articulating “freedom as a place” (Gilmore 2022:474) and the importance of Du Bois’s work for re-membering the past toward reconstituting new futures (Heynen and Ybarra 2021).
Certainly, Black residents’ politically and socially emplaced praxes along North Claiborne were deliberately oppositional to white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction moment. Understood as syncopations against the ground rhythms of white supremacy, residents’ overlapping political, cultural, and social spatial configurations offer insight into the possible futurity of Black geographical formations and Black residents’ imagining of the future as otherwise (Bates et al. 2018). Black residents’ disruptions, in other words, contest erasure and presence of Black futurity through improvisations that syncretize inhabitance. In this article, understanding this syncretization along North Claiborne relies on Du Bois’s empirical rigor and creative engagement with representation and fiction to track and depict white supremacy and resistance.
Du Bois’s empirical work in The Philadelphia Negro details a causal relationship between the relational and multi-scaled geographies of white supremacy, insisting that the past must be meticulously understood if alternative geographical formations can be imagined and formed. That is, his empirics grapple with how racial processes make geographies marked by privilege, accumulation, and value and geographies marked as devalued, unequal, and exploited. His speculative account of the all-seeing megascope in The Princess Steel further suggests his empirical interests in documenting the full breadth of racial capitalism, within which we can situate moments and geographies like North Claiborne.
Though critically important, this analytical framework cannot account for what scholars in Black geographies have increasingly demanded from empirical work in Black spaces: that it speak beyond loss and pain (Bledsoe et al. 2017; McKittrick and Woods 2007; see also Tuck 2009). Thus, while a Du Boisian analysis of North Claiborne’s many raced lives, from plantationism to segregation to racial zoning to redlining to developmental racism to urban renewal to highway construction to gentrification, is necessary work in the vein of reform, this empirical lens leaves less room for understanding and representing Black geographical praxis far beyond the norms, empirical logics, and classificatory systems that reify white supremacy. In other words, while we can account for and detail these Black socio-spatial praxes, we are still pressed to (re)construct their “thereness” through new forms of representation that refute the ways whiteness insidiously appears through representational imagery and cartography. Du Bois’s graphical work for the 1900 Paris Exposition, though focused on the relational dimensions of racism, complements his empirical work through representations that richly engage the viewer in the tense, mundane, and often blatant realities documented in his work. The choices of color, line, image, and text made across Du Bois’s graphic work importantly highlight Black life and white supremacy beyond sheer enumeration.
Image 5, a digital rendering of a possible future expansion of Congo Square’s resonating spaces and intricate paving patterns created by landscape architect Justin Thomas, explores mutuality and genealogical inhabitance through collage. Like Images 2–4, this image collapses time by rendering historical and contemporary inhabitants within the space. This type of graphical memory work not only refutes erasure but also draws out Black placemaking as continued inhabitance of place. The importance of Congo Square, amplified in Wynton Marsalis’s album Congo Square, which debuted in post-Katrina New Orleans and in Congo Square in 2006, is understood through its spatial and genealogical assemblage of freedom (Marsalis and Addy 2007). From the time slavery began in New Orleans in 1719 through to the present, Congo Square has always been a site of free congregation for Black residents.
Congo Square, Mixed-Media Collage, Justin Thomas, 2022.
Marsalis’s album and Thomas’s rendering represent this space as a “Ring Shout” between the past and the present, the space where freedom amidst slavery, freedom amidst continued dispossession, and freedom amidst flood waters come together. Congo Square, where African drumming used to and still resounds, syncopates against the ground rhythms and practices of developmental racism through the work of inhabitance and continued presencing of Black life and expression. By presenting inhabitance at the confluence of the past and the present, Thomas’s rendering suggests the intricate practice of freedom through mundane acts of sitting on a bench under the oak trees, through children moving freely, and through gathering those we love and honor, even if past on, to witness the continued daily pulling of a drum beat toward something else. As Du Bois insists, the present is integrated fully with the past, and Thomas’s rendering presents not just stories of loss but also memories of everyday acts of resistance that continue to speak to this site’s power.
Resistance to racial segregation is a recombinatory practice—a rich and dynamic web of interactions and assemblages that literally and metaphorically touch(ed) the ground of the North Claiborne corridor. This genealogy of activism and placemaking persists through new waves of activism and culture bearing—from CAHP’s memory work to residents’ reimagining of the North Claiborne corridor after the construction of I-10 (Claiborne Avenue Design Team 1976; Brad 2021) to residents’ claiming of the spaces under the I-10 overpass for gathering and celebration to residents’ activism in the face of gentrification after Hurricane Katrina. This genealogical mutuality over time, space, and individuals roots political and cultural placemaking in a type of memory work that actively engages the past and the present in reimaging the future. By engaging with these genealogical threads of memory, residents along the North Claiborne corridor actively trace new desired paths toward different futures.
We might think of this activism, whether through political resistance or musical heritage or cultural praxis, as the liminal space between the grounding of white supremacy and the reimagining of new spatial configurations. As Beyer (1999:539) notes, jazz brings together the “first line of deconstructive work” as well as “the second line of their reconstructive ambition.” Memory work, the types illuminated in these four collages (Images 2–5), pulls these beats together, refuting denigration and erasure, which is articulated by drawing on Du Bois’s empirical ground, at the same time that it elaborates a desire for freedom as a tangible place, state of being, and reconstruction (see also Heynen and Ybarra 2021).
As Gilmore (2022:480–81), drawing on Cedric Robinson’s term “ontological totality,” notes, Black people in the American South “didn’t make what they made from nothing. . .They brought things with them—sensibilities, dependencies, talents. . .—to make where they were into places they wished them to be.” “Ordinary people, in changing diversity, figure out how to stretch or diminish social and spatial forms to create rooms for their lives. Signs and traces of abolition geographies abound, even in their fragility” (p. 481). As a syncopating beat, North Claiborne’s residents ground these “abolition geographies” through a host of tangible spatial acts, through the praxis of being together and through the tactile work of celebrating, stitching together, remembering and imagining a mutual geography that sustains and supports Black life.
Conclusion: The Ongoing Problem of Whiteness
In this article, I argue that Du Boisian spatial analytics are critical to how Black futures might be understood and represented as counter to the spatial logics and geographical work of white supremacy. Through telescopic layering and weaving together, I read New Orleans’s North Claiborne landscape as one always alive and in contestation of any future that is not Black (Brand 2021). Further, I argue that it is the salient temporally and geographically scaled lives of North Claiborne, a Black geography not unlike Du Bois’s 7th Ward (Du Bois [1899] 1996; see also Hunter 2013), that refutes the classification, containment, abstraction, and erasure of Black geographic life and futurity inherent to white supremacist spatial praxes (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Lipsitz 2011).
In 1903, just 4 years after The Philadelphia Negro was published, Du Bois ([1903] 2015) wrote The Souls of Black Folk, where he elaborated his idea that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Yet it is in The Philadelphia Negro, where Du Bois’s detailed account of the “tangible and measurable” differences between whites and Blacks and the “deeper and less easily described” workings of whiteness, that Du Bois truly illuminates whites’ creation and maintenance, saturation and impermeability of a Black|white color line ([1899] 1996:350). He notes that “the difficulties encountered by the Negro on account of sweeping conclusions made about him are manifold” ([1899] 1996:339). Such manifold repercussions include job loss, lower wages and vulnerability, higher rents, and poorer housing, as well as the maintenance of the color line through the exercise and privilege of whiteness (see also Harris 1993).
Du Bois’s work in The Philadelphia Negro places white supremacy squarely in the center of these manifold and plainly evident problems, empirically challenging the conclusion that Black residents in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward are truly free from the ongoing practices of racism. From his multifaceted and therefore irreducible account of Black life in The Philadelphia Negro to his fictional explorations of empiricism to his cartographic experiments, Du Bois carefully lays a rich and nuanced empirical ground that can still inform our understandings of race and white supremacy and the ongoing problem of whiteness.
Tracing Du Bois’s work in The Philadelphia Negro forward allows us to fully grapple with the continued resonance and importance of this work. Though Du Bois would later develop his ideas about abolition democracy in Black Reconstruction (Du Bois [1935] 2007), The Philadelphia Negro provides a basis for understanding the geographical complexity of freedom as it is made within the confines and intricacies of racial oppression and as it is made toward some other place.
Du Bois’s methodological interventions also continue to provide a meticulous way for analyzing the ongoing problem of white supremacy as a vector that is historically contingent, relational, and scalar. In other words, white supremacy, in a Du Boisian sense, is centrally a geographical project that has magnitude and direction—is historically contingent, yet in flux; it is relational in a geographical and temporal sense; and it is multidimensionally experienced and enacted. White supremacy, understood through Du Bois, is a set of interlocking practices and spatialities that shape but do not fully delineate Black life (see McKittrick 2013, 2016) and geographical futurity. In the end, these are the empirical possibilities and hope that Du Bois’s work continues to offer us.
