The Sawyer Seminar at Tulane University presents a film screening of Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans with an introduction by Dr. Pamela Sertzen.
This screening is part of a three-part series of events, Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro: Exploring urban displacement in Treme and Valongo Wharf, highlighting community activism in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro as ways to challenge disinvestment in Afro-descendant neighborhoods and raising questions about the tendency for these places to be subordinated to outward-facing urban “renewal”.
Free and open for all to attend, this screening will take place in the Stone Auditorium in the Woldenberg Art Center on Tulane’s uptown campus.This event will be enforcing Tulane COVID-19 policies regarding face-coverings and vaccination statuses, please check online at https://tulane.edu/covid-19 for the most recent updates.
If you anticipate needing any type of reasonable accommodation or have questions about event accessibility, please contact Chloe at ctucker6@tulane.edu at least 10 days in advance.
About the Film:
Faubourg Tremé is considered the oldest black neighborhood in America, the origin of the southern civil rights movement, and the birthplace of jazz. Long before Hurricane Katrina, two native New Orleanians, one black and one white — writer Lolis Eric Elie and filmmaker Dawn Logsdon — began documenting the rich, living culture of this historic district. Miraculously, their tapes survived the disaster unscathed. The completed film, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, which critics have hailed as “devastating,” “charming,” and “revelatory,” brims with unearthed historical nuggets. Who knew that in the early 1800s while most African Americans were toiling on plantations, free black people in Tremé were publishing poetry and conducting symphonies? Who knew that long before Rosa Parks, Tremé leaders organized sit-ins and protests that successfully desegregated the city’s streetcars and schools? Who knew that jazz, New Orleans’ greatest gift to America, was born from the embers of this first American civil rights movement? Elie, a New Orleans newspaperman, takes us on a tour of his city — in what evolves from a reflection on the relevance of history into a love letter to the storied New Orleans neighborhood Faubourg Tremé.