Look On! "Tremé" & Plessy

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

'I know I am not an American citizen in the eyes of the powers that be.'

With these words the story of an historic New Orleans neighborhood comes full circle.
It was in this neighborhood that even before the Civil War hommes de couleur libré -- free people of color -- led lives of style and culture. It was in this neighborhood that fiery journalists published periodicals calling for equal citizenship. Prompted by their calls, a man of African and European ancestry, Homère Patris Plessy (left), dared on this day in 1892 to defy a new segregation law by sitting in a "white" car. As posted here, his test case ended when the Supreme Court held 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that the Constitution permitted state-mandated segregation as long as facilities were "'equal but separate.'" That decision held sway until Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Plessy's New Orleans home nonetheless continued to thrive as "the oldest black neighborhood in America, the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement in the South and the home of jazz."
Plessy's story is the story of this neighborhood, just as this neighborhood's story is Plessy's. Both are told beautifully in a just-released film that bears the neighborhood's name, "Faubourg Tremé." I saw "Tremé," subtitled "The Untold Story of Black New Orleans," at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it won a much-deserved Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Documentary. The film is screening in the same city again today and elsewhere in the United States in the next months, and is available as well on DVD (right).
Producers Lucie Faulknor, Dawn Logsdon, and Lolis Eric Elie began "Tremé" well before August 29, 2005, the date that water surging in the wake of Hurricane Katrina broke levees and flooded much of New Orleans. The damage done to Tremé and its people thus forms an unsettling frame around the picture the producers initially set out to paint. In pre-Katrina footage neighbors are upbeat, proud of their home. After Katrina they are sapped of spirit. Some leave for good. The grief of those who stay is palpable. One is Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey (right). Another is is Glen David Andrews, who speaks of how music saved him from a rough life on the street. He is jubilant as he plays his trombone for the neighborhood. But that is early on. An interview with Andrews soon after Katrina shows that the government's failure to protect him and those close to him left him utterly at a loss. It is he who says:

'I know I am not an American citizen in the eyes of the powers that be.'

In Andrews' words one hears an eerie echo of how Plessy must have felt on reading the Supreme Court's ruling 112 years ago.



(Cross-posted at Slate's Convictions blog)

On June 7

On this day in ...
... 1893 (115 years ago today), a 25-year-old, India-born barrister practicing in Durban, Mohandas K. Gandhi, was thrown off a South African train because he had sat in a compartment reserved for whites. The incident -- the 1st act of civil disobedience by Gandhi, seated in the photo at left -- occurred a year to the day after Homère Patris Plessy was dragged out of a Louisiana train for the same reason. (See too post above.)
... 1948 (60 years ago today), Eduard Beneš abdicated his post as President of Czechoslovakia, a move that placed the state in control of the Soviet Union. Beneš, who had been a resistance fighter during World War I, helped negotiate Czech independence during the Paris peace talks, and served as Czech President before and after World War II, died a few months later at age 64. (credit for 1921 photo of Beneš with his wife, Hana)

On June 7, ...

... 1929, the Holy See attained sovereign status when the Italian Foreign Minister and an envoy of Pope Pius XI, meeting in Rome, exchanged copies of the Lateran Treaty that had been ratified earlier in the year.
... 1892 (115 years ago today), at Press Street railway station in New Orleans, an American man of African and European ancestry, born Homère Patris Plessy fewer than 3 months after the Emancipation Proclamation, boarded the "White Only" car of a train headed for Covington, Louisiana. A detective dragged him out and arrested him for violating the Separate Car Act of 1890, which authorized imprisonment for defying the requirement that railroads in Louisiana segregate passengers by race. Plessy (pictured at left) and the Citizens Committee that had recruited him pressed his civil disobedience challenge all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In its 1896 judgment in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court sustained the maintenance of "separate but equal" facilities by a vote of 7 to 1. The Court reversed itself in 1954, to join the view of Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in Plessy, that such de jure segregation violates the Constitution.