Beneath The Bayou

Beneath The Bayou Celebrating Louisiana's culture, traditions, food, festivals, hidden gems, and the memories that make the Bayou State home.

10/17/2026

Segregation pushed Black commerce in New Orleans onto South Rampart Street, a corridor locals called the Harlem of the South, lined with Black-owned theaters, clubs, and storefronts. The Iroquois Theater hosted a young Louis Armstrong, who also worked at the Karnofsky family's tailor shop just steps away. Urban renewal in the mid twentieth century tore most of the corridor down, leaving only a handful of buildings standing. 🎷

In the 1950s, during the height of segregation, Pontchartrain Park was built so Black New Orleanians could finally own h...
10/17/2026

In the 1950s, during the height of segregation, Pontchartrain Park was built so Black New Orleanians could finally own homes of their own — complete with a golf course designed for the neighborhood. It became one of the first Black suburban communities in the South.

A workaround that became a legacy.

Grand Coteau, Louisiana — a small St. Landry Parish crossroads built up by free Black and Creole landowning families gen...
10/17/2026

Grand Coteau, Louisiana — a small St. Landry Parish crossroads built up by free Black and Creole landowning families generations before the Civil War, anchored by its churches and schools.

Not every Creole town is on the map people know. This one should be.

10/17/2026

Isle de Jean Charles has been home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw community since the 1830s. Rising water and oil canals cut through the marsh shrank the island from twenty two thousand acres to under four hundred, swallowing homes, cemeteries, and hunting grounds generation by generation. In 2016, it became the first federally funded climate relocation in American history, a resettlement plan still unfolding today. 🌊

10/16/2026

In 1857, a fifteen year old calling herself Alexina Morrison ran from a New Orleans slave trader and did something almost unheard of. She sued him in court, claiming she had been born to white parents and wrongfully enslaved. ⚖️

Three trials unfolded over the next five years, with juries asked again and again to decide what looking white legally meant. A fourth trial never happened. The Union Army took New Orleans, the war ended slavery, and the historical record of Alexina Morrison and the daughter she gave birth to in jail goes quiet after that.

How much of history turned on who a jury chose to believe?

In the heart of Tremé, the Backstreet Cultural Museum keeps the culture of Mardi Gras Indians, second lines, and jazz fu...
10/16/2026

In the heart of Tremé, the Backstreet Cultural Museum keeps the culture of Mardi Gras Indians, second lines, and jazz funerals alive — founded by Sylvester Francis, who spent decades collecting the suits, photos, and stories most archives never thought to save.

Culture you can only really understand in person.

10/16/2026

In 1966, a small archive founded at Fisk University set out to preserve one thing: the historical record of Black America. Sixty years later, the Amistad Research Center holds millions of documents and sits permanently at Tulane University, the largest independently held African American archive in the country. 📜

Its collections stretch from eighteenth century French Louisiana slave records to the personal papers of New Orleans civil rights leaders and musicians. Names, dates, letters, and photographs that might otherwise have been lost, all gathered under one roof.

What family papers, tucked away somewhere, are waiting to be found?

Tucked on Esplanade Avenue, Le Musée de f.p.c. is one of the only museums in the country built entirely around the histo...
10/15/2026

Tucked on Esplanade Avenue, Le Musée de f.p.c. is one of the only museums in the country built entirely around the history of free people of color — the gens de couleur libres who shaped New Orleans long before the Civil War.

Property records, portraits, and personal objects tell a story most textbooks skip.

Have you been? Tell us below.

10/15/2026

In 1951, Josephite priests opened a school in Tremé with one clear purpose: giving Black boys in New Orleans the Catholic college-prep education the city's white Catholic schools refused to offer them. St. Augustine High School became that place. 📚

Black families funded much of the school themselves, building something lasting out of a system designed to shut them out. Decades later, its Marching 100 band would become a source of citywide pride, carrying the school's name far beyond Tremé's streets.

What doors did your family build when none were opened for them?

New Roads, Louisiana sits on False River — a crescent lake left behind when the Mississippi changed course generations a...
10/15/2026

New Roads, Louisiana sits on False River — a crescent lake left behind when the Mississippi changed course generations ago.

Pointe Coupee Parish is home to one of Louisiana's oldest Creole communities: free and enslaved families who built, farmed, and worshipped along this water for more than two centuries. Their descendants are still here.

This is one of the towns carrying that story forward. More to come.

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Houma, LA
70360

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