After Jim Crow, I Saw New Orleans’ Black Middle Class Thrive. Then Came ‘Jeff Crow.’

Willie Calhoun, 76, a lifelong resident of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, traces a straight line from Jim Crow to what he calls “Jeff Crow” — the modern policies and economics that keep Black families from moving forward. Drawing on memories of a once-thriving Black middle class built on longshore work, public-sector jobs, and strong neighborhood schools, he describes how disinvestment, environmental racism, unequal funding for Black institutions like Southern University, and post-Katrina education and housing policies hollowed out the community’s economic base.

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward when Jim Crow was still the law, and what I see now feels like we went from Jim Crow to Jeff Crow, just new ways to stop Black people from moving forward. During the 1950s and ’60s, we saw Black men going to work every day; on the riverfront alone, you would have at least 10,000 men going out to work the docks, and today you have less than 500 in the union, which speaks to where we are. Most of the people who made up the Lower Ninth Ward were longshoremen, lawyers, teachers, post office people; all of those people were living within this community, including my father, who was a longshoreman.

Education has always been a primary factor in the middle class, and my parents encouraged us to go to school. When I grew up on Delery Street, it was oyster shells, and my parents fought to get better streets. In the ’70s, a federal project came down where the homeowner had to put in some money, and that is how we got paved streets down here, when we only had maybe five paved streets north of Claiborne and over 18,000 people living in this area before Katrina. It was not surprising to me after Hurricane Katrina to see that the middle class was under attack and, for the most part, destroyed, along with our teachers and those who were educated. If you look at where it is now, Louisiana ranks last in education, contrary to back during the ’50s and ’60s when our parents demanded that we get a fair education.

It is unfortunate that the mindset has been to keep going back to that Jim Crow piece, to keep Black people and other people behind. Southern University is a land grant institution, and so is Louisiana State University, yet Southern has not seen anywhere near the amount of money that LSU has seen, and you have got to think about why that is. Environmentally, we were always on the other side of the tracks, living in the most contaminated areas, with factories and plants always put where we lived. When you look at the Industrial Canal, that canal was a man‑made canal created to enrich some white folks who wanted a shortcut from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, and that impacted the people that lived in the Lower Ninth Ward. There was never a design for lifting us up; the design has always been to hold us down, and when you think about the middle class here in New Orleans, for the most part it was destroyed.

My parents’ message was that you have a better advantage, a better opportunity, if you have an education. What my mother and father faced was, “You cannot have this job because you do not have the education,” so they made it a point that we got the message about going to school. I still recall what my daddy told me when I had friends going into the French Quarter to dance; he told me that as long as I went to school, I would be okay and I would be taken care of. For the most part in the Lower Ninth Ward, that is what happened; those longshoremen, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and the people that worked at the sugar refinery and Kaiser Aluminum brought those monies back into this neighborhood. I can cite several people that had businesses down here that never left the Lower Ninth and still made a good living, but now we do not have a revenue base coming back into the neighborhood like we once had.