Katy Reckdahl

<h1>NEW ORLEANS — Le Musée de f.p.c. is devoted to the story of the free people of color of New Orleans, as told by their descendants.</h1>

Kim Coleman, 29, a curator at the museum whose grandmother was born three blocks from Le Musée, says that she sees it as a “reminder of who built the city culturally, politically and economically,” even as the black population of the surrounding Tremé-Lafitte neighborhood dropped to 64 percent from 92 percent after Hurricane Katrina.

Before the Civil War, free people of color made up a higher proportion of the population in New Orleans than anywhere else in the United States. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, free black residents made up about 20 percent of the city’s population, largely because French and Spanish officials had allowed enslaved people to purchase their freedom.

Le Musée de f.p.c. is on the first floor of a grand, white-pillared mansion on Esplanade Avenue. Two hundred years ago, French-speaking Afro-Creole free people of color owned much of the property along Esplanade, a broad boulevard shaded by massive, gnarled live oak trees.

Free people of color, or gens de couleur libre, were highly educated, though their occupations didn’t always reflect that. Some held prominent positions — as composers, artists, artisans — but their primary occupations were carpenters, cigar makers, shoemakers, laborers and deliverymen. They also played a notable role in the city’s sugar industry in the early 1800s, after thousands of free people of color arrived from the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti.

“In this area, free people of color left their fingerprints on everything,” said Beverly Stanton McKenna, a newspaper publisher who founded the museum in 2008 with her husband, Dwight McKenna.

In the museum, the history is told through rooms hung salon-style with documents, paintings and photographs that shed light on the French and Spanish colonial eras and enslavement, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Alongside sculpture in the museum’s front parlor stands a sizable portrait of Louis Charles Roudanez, the pioneering Paris-educated physician and Civil War-era publisher whose spirit guided the McKennas’ vision for the museum.

Despite the grandeur of the setting and its deep history, the museum’s name reflects the humiliations that free people of color, no matter how wealthy, endured before the Civil War. In documents, their racial status was abbreviated in lowercase letters: f.p.c. They couldn’t vote or hold public office, couldn’t establish organizations without permission. In many of the painted portraits women wear tignons — head wraps that a Spanish governor began requiring of all women of color in 1786 — as a way of indicating inferior status.

The museum’s tours, which are by appointment only, are led by one of about a dozen docents, almost all of whom have roots within the city’s community of free people of color. When docent Delores Heglar, 71, is giving a tour, she likes to spend a little extra time explaining the Louisiana Purchase and its devastating effect on the city’s free people of color.

“Think of it this way,” Heglar said. “I’m a lawyer. I can practice freely. I have money in the bank. If a white person commits a crime against me, I can go to court. I can move freely around the city, whether I’m slave or I’m free. But once the United States purchased Louisiana and Louisiana becomes a state, I have to carry papers wherever I go. I can no longer speak in court. I have to have a white person represent me, even though I have more money than he does and my law degree is probably better.”

In other American cities, these racial restrictions might have seemed routine. But in New Orleans, free people of color had already experienced freedom, Heglar said. “So naturally, if you put your thumb on me, I’m going to find a way to resist.”

And many did resist. During Reconstruction, free people of color were the driving force behind Louisiana’s progressive constitution in 1868, which gave equal civil and political rights to all black men and established a state-funded, racially integrated public school system.

After Reconstruction was scrapped, a committee of New Orleans activists, including a shoemaker, Homer Plessy, plotted a legal case against racially segregated train cars, an 1892 effort that backfired with the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, ushering in the Jim Crow era across the Deep South.

Then in the 1960s, descendants of the same New Orleans community fought, once again, for voting rights and school integration, in ways that led the nation.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, the McKennas founded Le Musée de f.p.c. in the same spirit, as a remonstrance to arguments that many of the city’s poorest black citizens should not return. By that time, they had collected a lifetime of documents, photographs and artwork. Not a scrap of it was ruined in the waters that flooded 80 percent of the city after the storm.

“To us, it was a sign that we should open our collection and share it with people who are not familiar with this rich history,” McKenna said. “You could say, in a way, that it’s been hidden from us.”

Today, inside Le Musée de f.p.c., walls and shelves reveal rarely seen documents — manumission papers granting freedom to former slaves, property records showing that one-third of the French Quarter was once owned by people of color and, finally, a replica of a petition that was hand-delivered in 1864 to President Abraham Lincoln by two prominent free black men from New Orleans, Arnold Bertonneau and Jean Baptiste Roudanez, the brother of Louis Charles.

The petition, signed by more than 1,000 free men of color, asked Lincoln to enact universal suffrage for black men. “We are men, treat us as such,” the petition read.

The president met with the two men, told them that their suffrage was up to the state of Louisiana, and then wrote a letter to Louisiana’s governor urging him to allow some black voters.

On a side wall of her museum, McKenna displays a photograph of her great-grandmother, who was born into slavery in Giles County, Tennessee, in 1860. Below it hangs a photo of her father as he graduated from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1929. By 1933, her father became one of the first two black men elected to the Indiana State Legislature.

“This is who we are,” McKenna said. “This is our story.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="02212120-7a8f-405e-8cbb-ffdb2b709dc9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/free-people-of-color-museum-new-orleans.html">The New York Times</a>.

Descendants Tell Stories of Free People of Color

Before the Civil War, free people of color made up a higher proportion of the population in New Orleans than anywhere else in the United States.

Descendants tell stories of free people of color

The department disseminated clear images and made an arrest within a few days, Michael Harrison, the New Orleans police superintendent, told privacy expert Julia Angwin in a panel discussion on the future of policing.

“That’s how we are able to go to surviving victims or families of victims and tell them, ‘Yes, justice is served,'” Harrison told Angwin.

Angwin, an editor at The Markup, a news site focused on technology’s societal impact, conceded that “everyone is going to be surveilled” but raised concerns about civil liberties and the use of cameras and their oversight. Harrison, who is usually reserved, was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about his force’s new tool. “Any sheriff or law enforcement executive who does not have this is living in the Dark Ages and working far behind the times.”

Harrison said the city’s 300 cameras were placed on public poles on public streets and that staff members from the city’s Real Time Crime Monitoring Center tapped into the cameras’ live feed only when prompted by a 911 call reporting crime in a one-mile radius. He calls it a “crime-fighting tool,” not surveillance.

He said that residents and businesses were now able to buy their own cameras and that they could opt into use by the center with hopes of using images to capture not only gunmen but also petty criminals who deal drugs or dump trash illegally. “Who doesn’t want to identify the murderer?” Angwin asked. “But what about the protester, the dumper?”

Research conducted in surveillance-heavy European cities shows that such cameras don’t deter crime, she said. “It often displaces crime, so it can move it to another area of the city, and can help in solving crimes.” Harrison nodded. During the year that the cameras have been active, he’s already seen violent-crime hot spots shift. “I would agree that it doesn’t always deter crime, but sometimes displaces it,” he said.

Harrison said that because the New Orleans Police Department was under a federal consent decree, his staff had been working with the decree’s monitor to create and carry out policies that ensured that camera images could be uploaded only to a secure police-evidence cloud, not downloaded by an operator. The decree very specifically limits monitoring to local officials and precludes sharing surveillance with immigration officials, he said; federal law enforcement partners have to request access for specific crimes that have been committed.

To start, the images can be viewed only from a computer screen in the monitoring center when police dispatchers receive a 911 call, he said. “And then we’re monitoring the people who are monitoring to make that sure they’re not abusing that.”

“What you’re describing, of how it turns on once there’s an incident, is actually something we know already in policing — it’s called ‘the probable-cause standard, right?'” Angwin said. “But what is the civilian oversight or the judicial oversight to make sure that’s really true?”

Also, Angwin asked, did everyone in New Orleans know how to deal with images generated by the camera system? “We have a clear system in the offline world,” she said. Probable cause is clearly defined in court, for instance. “And we know what happens afterward: how to challenge that warrant in court.”

Dealing with legal matters generated from online images is much more murky, she said. “This is a situation where it’s totally outside of those rules, right? And so I think what we face as a society is building that set of rules.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/when-policing-and-privacy-intersect.html" id="40367c75-ff84-37c2-ae0e-af29fc1b0284">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — It’s not the type of crime that typically ends in arrest: a killing in a parking garage after a suspected drug deal. But a camera from the New Orleans Police Department’s $40 million camera system caught high-definition images of the probable killer.

When Policing and Privacy Intersect

Leaders of other cities told him that instead of displacing existing residents, they would work harder to keep them in place as rents and property values increased. Duggan returned to Detroit and worked to help carry out an ordinance requiring developers who buy discounted city-owned land or receive a certain level of municipal support to include a minimum of 20 percent of permanent affordable-housing units in their buildings.

He adopted a philosophy that stops short of the “chicken in every pot” pledge attributed to Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign. But he and Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, and Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California, agreed that a healthy city must help its lower-income citizens, instead of simply ignoring the poverty in its midst.

Wylde said that Amazon was bringing 150,000 jobs to New York because the city’s universities had worked hard to develop skills within the city’s workforce.

“They are not coming because of the incentives we offered,” she said. “They’re coming for talent; they need a talent pipeline that is very big and that they can tap.”

Duggan also required developers who received subsidies to ensure that 51 percent of their employees were Detroit residents. Those who did not meet that requirement paid a penalty that went into a fund to help train local residents to be plumbers, carpenters and electricians.

In four years, developers who had started out with 6 percent local residents have risen to about 30 percent, he said.

When Tubbs took office, he talked to his staff about Stockton’s high poverty rates — 22 percent of its residents were under the poverty line in 2017. “The crux of all our issues is poverty,” he told staff members. “Let’s find the most radical intervention for poverty. Give me a policy.”

After extensive research, his staff came back and told him, “Give out a basic income; give people money.”

At first, they had conversations about “the dignity of work,” Tubbs said. “Work has dignity,” he said. But he added that it was “inherently undignified” for people working 14 hours a day or driving lengthy Uber shifts to try to pay their bills.

Starting early next year, the Economic Security Project, a private foundation, will pay a group of Stockton residents $500 a month for 18 months, with no strings attached. It is part of an experiment to determine how people use money, Tubbs said.

“I started out as a skeptic,” he said. “But now I’m 100 percent resolved. Folks need an economic floor, at least to build on.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/us/what-are-the-keys-to-economic-recovery.html" id="d43eb377-f4db-3034-a0a3-b96b2b297a19">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — As Mayor Mike Duggan was trying to revive Detroit, he traveled to other parts of the country and talked with planners and officials in flourishing urban areas. He had vacant buildings, left behind in the early 2000s, as jobs had dried up and 260,000 people left the financially stagnant city. Duggan heard about the downside of prosperity, including gentrification. So he asked, “If you were in Brooklyn and you could rewind the clock, what would you do differently?”

What Are the Keys to Economic Recovery?

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Katy Reckdahl

Articles written by the author

Descendants tell stories of free people of color

When Policing and Privacy Intersect

What Are the Keys to Economic Recovery?