FAUBOURG TREMÉ

History

The Faubourg Tremé (pronounced Fow-borg Tra-may) is a New Orleans neighborhood next door to the infamous French Quarter area. It is an area rich in historical and cultural significance. When Hurricane Katrina blew into New Orleans, all sorts of coverings were peeled back and much about New Orleans was revealed to the world. The poverty and racial inequality were laid bare, as was the extreme vulnerability to natural disaster. But one thing Katrina didn't uncover was the forgotten history of this most improbable of American cities.

In New Orleans' Faubourg Tremé, America's first civil rights movement was in full swing in the 1860s. Its progress was chronicled in the New Orleans Tribune, the nation's first African American daily newspaper. Who knew that black new Orleanians sent a delegation to meet with Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War? Who knew that here, slaves often sued their masters for payment of back wages and freedom itself? Who knew that Rosa Parks great sit-in was an echo of what happened nine decades earlier in New Orleans? While it was illegal in much of the United States to teach black people to read, Tremé residents were holding regular literary salons and publishing Les Cennelles, the first anthology of poetry by African Americans. And it was home to Congo Square, the place where African Americans danced traditional dances, played traditional music and preserved many of the fundamental old world elements that would eventually become jazz.

Faubourg Tremé is about all that ancient history as well as its current manifestations. The Tremé remains a largely black neighborhood, but it is in the throes of a battle against gentrification and the loss of its cultural identity. Told from the point-of-view of one of the area's newest residents, the film brings alive the history of this most exceptional place from its antebellum beginnings, through its jazz age development to its modern struggles with urban blight and ignorance of its history.