Summers in New Orleans are always rough — hot, rainy, swelteringly muggy, then sunny and hotter again. But it has been an especially hard one this year, as the high temperatures and flood-inducing thunderstorms have been paired with what has felt like a weekly loss of cultural anchors. It’s always worrying for a town when its obituary pages read like a who’s who. The community has had to say goodbye to four towering icons — the renowned Creole chef Leah Chase and the musicians Dr. John (born Mac Rebennack, who dressed and sounded like the city), Dave Bartholomew (who wrote much of the 1950s R&B canon) and Art Neville, the funky keyboard-playing brother of the Meters and the Neville Brothers bands.

The deaths came at about the same time The Times-Picayune, chronicler of the city’s life and its deaths for 182 years, suffered its own passing, sold to its upstart rival The New Orleans Advocate, an offshoot of a paper up the river in Baton Rouge.

Nearly all of New Orleans read the paper. Indeed, for much of its modern history, The Times-Picayune had the highest rate of daily print penetration among newspapers in the 50 biggest metro areas, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Now, according to Poynter, less than a third of the former Times-Picayune staffers are staying in New Orleans journalism.

I was born in New Orleans and worked as a columnist at the paper for more than a decade. I saw firsthand the love, hate and pride New Orleanians felt for their newspaper. While icons and institutions come and go in any city, the loss of these culture bearers (and papers are indeed bearers themselves) comes at a particularly precarious time for New Orleans.

Outsiders (who used to only visit) are putting down roots, tilting the delicate balance between those residents who move to the city because they love it and those who naturally embody the city’s culture because they live it. About a decade ago, 77 percent of New Orleanians were born in Louisiana and had spent most of their lives there. After the town recovered from Hurricane Katrina, however, those numbers started to shift. The city has become less populous, less black, more white, richer at its historic center and poorer in many surrounding neighborhoods.

In 2018 some storied areas saw housing prices rocket by nearly 30 percent in just half a year. I Recent data from Richard Campanella, a professor at Tulane University show how between 2012 and 2016, over 13,000 people moved to New Orleans from outside the state; many are affluent, influential and brimming with disposable income and fresh energy. But they’ve also brought threats to the city’s New Orleans-ness: What may be felt as run-of-the-mill gentrification anywhere else feels like an epochal shift here.

New Orleanians are asking: With our paper of record bought, and practically buried, how will the replacement that it folded into cover and embody a city whose very identity is in flux?

New Orleans in 2019 is actually feeling much as it did in 1837, the year when The Picayune, precursor of The Times-Picayune, first hit the streets. During that era, following the Louisiana Purchase, then statehood in 1812, swarms of Anglos had begun pouring into the former French colony. The newly arrived Americans and the native Creole population fought bitterly about the language that would be spoken, the dances that would be danced and the degree of racial oppression that would be official state policy.

Back then, The Picayune ended up on the side of the newcomers, as a decidedly pro-American newspaper. For most of its history it fought vigorously against everything that was good, right and distinctive about New Orleans. Even in the 19th century the city, for all of its problems, had rich, multiracial traditions. Yet for decades, the paper either ignored or pilloried that city’s music, gastronomy and other cultural expressions. Those traditions, borne out of the relatively mild racism of the French and Spanish colonial periods, allowed the town to develop a vibrant, politically active, partially free black middle class.

The traditions often transcended race, as they still do in many ways today. But Picayune staff members like the popular society page columnist in the 1930s, Dorothy Dix, instead repeatedly denigrated the role of “Negro mammies” in, for instance, the development of Creole cuisine. Leah Chase, and those who taught her, would rightfully disagree.

Jazz, the emblematic sound of New Orleans, was infamously disowned in a June 1918 Times-Picayune column: “We do not recognize the honor of parenthood," the editorial read, and “where it has crept in we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it.”

Ashton Phelps, a former managing director of the Picayune and a veteran of the White League, the terrorist militia that attacked the city’s interracial Republican Metropolitan Police at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1872 and effectively put an end to Reconstruction in Louisiana.

In a detailed mea culpa published in 1993, The Times-Picayune admitted for “the greater part of its years, the newspaper gave readers an image of black people as intellectually and morally inferior, relegated to a lower social caste than white people and often little more than lazy or criminal.” By the time David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and former state congressman, made the runoff in Louisiana’s 1991 race for governor, The Times-Picayune was his most powerful critic, publishing devastating articles laying bare his history, earning it local and national praise.

And in 2005, when 80 percent of New Orleans flooded, the newspaper earned the undying love of its city thanks to its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the levee failures induced by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

But the hurricane that was the paper’s biggest story was also of course the city’s biggest disaster, displacing tens of thousands: Almost 15 years later, the city’s population in general and its working-class black population in particular has diminished drastically. The Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance says the city needs more than 33,000 affordable housing units by 2025 to address its housing-costs crisis — a goal that’s looking evermore impossible.

New Orleanians like to say that people don’t change New Orleans, New Orleans changes people: A little blue isle in a big red state — a Creole, Carribean-esque milieu in a country that can feel all too generic — for years, we have seen the pull of the city attract and then transform newcomers. But in the past their numbers were few enough to be absorbed.

While gentrification has dozens of parallels in American cities, there’s something particularly disturbing about seeing how Mardi Gras Indians, musicians and members of parading organizations are being marginalized in a literal way, relegated to the suburbs. Seeing how when these culture bearers come to their old stomping ground to hang out or perform, the crowds around them aren’t mostly black renters but white homeowners and Airbnb guests.

Even on the culinary scene, the plethora of new restaurants in town, as good as they are, seem more reflective of national dining trends than of creative variations on local food.

The loss even of figures as iconic as Ms. Chase, Mr. Neville, Mr. Bartholomew and Dr. John wouldn’t have been so worrying in previous years because — like any great product, food, music or otherwise — the raw cultural materials needed to reproduce such personalities existed in the city’s core neighborhoods. But if New Orleans’s core neighborhoods are no longer populated by old-time New Orleanians, from whom is the next generation to learn?

And with The Times-Picayune as we knew it gone, does The Advocate have the institutional memory and editorial sensitivity to cover these demographic, economic and political shifts?

The owners of The Advocate, John and Dathal Georges, a conservative billionaire couple, hired a slew of Times-Picayune alumni. But they’ve been criticized for the dearth of black reporters on a staff charged with covering a city that is still 60 percent black.

Jarvis DeBerry, a black columnist affected by the Times-Picayune’s closing, accepted an offer with The Cleveland Plain Dealer instead. He did so in part, he said, because he didn’t want to work for a newspaper owned by a man who had twice run for public office. Mr. Georges is a Republican kingmaker and suspiciously viewed by many New Orleanians as the enemy within, much as the Anglos who started The Picayune were viewed. Still, encouragingly, the staff just earned a well-deserved Pulitzer for its reporting on Louisiana’s uniquely terrible jury laws.

Americanization and globalization have proved inevitable almost everywhere else on this continent. And further inequality seems inevitable as sea-level rise ravages the nearby coast and realtors bid up those neighborhoods away from flood zones even more. But New Orleans’s culture survived slavery, the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, Plessy v. Ferguson, hurricanes, oil booms and busts and post-Katrina privatization. So despite it all, somehow, I have faith the city will survive this wave, still feeling like some version of itself.

Lolis Eric Elie was a columnist at The Times-Picayune and story editor for the New Orleans-based HBO series “Treme.” He is currently a producer on Showtime’s “The Chi.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Source: Read Full Article