University of New Orleans public history students have taken their course work to the streets, specifically the streets of New Orleans, to share the stories behind some of the City’s recently renamed thoroughfares.
As part of a service learning class led by Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies director Mary Niall Mitchell, students have created a project entitled "From Robert E. Lee to Mama D,” a collection of education resources related to the city’s street renaming process.
Those resources include research starter kits available online at the city’s public library, TikTok videos and online mystery games. The research kits encourage students to explore the lives of important but sometimes lesser-known figures in New Orleans history.
Part of the project’s name refers to Dyan French Cole, a beloved community organizer and activist who died in 2017. Cole, known by many simply as “Mama D,” spent decades fighting for racial equality in New Orleans. In 1975, she became the first woman to head the city’s NAACP chapter.
Because women are underrepresented on street signs and other memorials in public spaces, the first starter kits focus on important women in New Orleans history nominated in the renaming process.
Mitchell, a history professor, was a member of the panel of historians working for the New Orleans City Council Street Renaming Commission. The Commission was tasked with replacing the names of confederate soldiers and white supremacists with those of New Orleans artists, activists and innovators who made positive contributions to the city's history.
“The city of New Orleans has been in the vanguard of cities re-examining who they honor with street names and monuments. The NOCCSRC—with a shout-out to Sue Mobley and Thomas Adams, who facilitated the complicated process from start to finish—has become a model for other cities doing this work,” Mitchell said. “This collaboration between the Midlo Center and the New Orleans Public Library, and the work of ľֱ public history students who shaped it, take the process a step further.
“Aimed at young people in particular, it demonstrates why these changes need to happen. It introduces the public to the many, many people who made New Orleans a more vibrant place, a more equitable place and a more just city,” Mitchell said.
ľֱ students are currently working on a podcast that will be used for driving tours. Mitchell said they hope to continue to build on the initial pilot program and create more resources for the library.
“A new crop of public history students are now working on a podcast they are calling ‘Streets on the Table,’ following a route from ľֱ around City Park to Xavier and telling some of the stories of the streets along the way, past, present and future,” Mitchell said. “We want residents to see that the cityscape, and how its inhabitants mark it, has changed not just in the 20th and 21st centuries, but over the long history of this place, from indigenous settlements and plantations through the Civil War, segregation and suburbanization.”
The series of mini podcasts will feature information about the person for whom the street used to be name for and information on the person that it is being renamed for.
Student Jordan Hammon is editing the audio for the podcast tour.
“This project is important because we want to give listeners an easy and enjoyable way to learn about these important changes to the city,” Hammon said. “All the new names in the commission report are rooted in New Orleans history, and after learning about Georges, Celestin and all the other new names, they too deserve to be honored and I hope the podcast/tour gets people as excited as I am.”
ľֱ student Ariel Roy, who attended Xavier University as an undergraduate, contributed research for the podcast on the renaming of Jefferson Davis Parkway in honor of Norman Francis, the university’s former president.
Roy said she wanted to make sure listeners understood the magnitude of renaming the street where the university is located in honor of Francis, who led the university for four decades.
“For my part, I explained that Dr. Norman C. Francis and Xavier University were interchangeable,” Roy said. “In my honest opinion, the name Jefferson Davis Parkway doesn't represent New Orleans' identity nor culture. I outlined that the city and many proponents of the name change campaigned hard for Norman C. Francis Parkway to reflect the university that sits right on the street.”
Public history student Emily Ratner said her research, which included a deep-dive into a U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case involving New Orleans’ City Park, reveals the purposeful disenfranchisement of the city’s Black residents by White residents. That disenfranchisement manifested itself in the names of streets, schools, parks and other institutions, Ratner said.
“That is for me the most inspiring aspect of the public education campaign surrounding the street renaming: By replacing the names of confederates, enslavers and segregationists with people who actively resisted their enslavement, with laborers, and with civil rights heroes, we New Orleanians remind ourselves, or learn for the first time, of our incredible accomplishments over generations,” Ratner said. “We challenge ourselves to be more human toward one another, and to see the humanity within one another. And we locate ourselves quite literally within the living, breathing evolving history of this incredible place.”
The renaming commission, formed in 2019, wrapped up its advisory work last year. Mitchell said historians on the panel thought there was a need for a stronger education outreach program to share the results to the public, particularly for K-12 students.
There were far more proposed names put before the commission than there were streets to be renamed, Mitchell said. The historians thought that sharing the histories highlighted in the deliberation process—and sharing them in an engaging way—would convey the importance of renaming to a broader public, Mitchell said.
“There are so many people who should be remembered for their contributions to New Orleans, visionaries, activists, educators, advocates, but their stories have not been told enough,” Mitchell said. “So, we have taken some of these life stories and made them accessible, with a particular focus on young people.”
They collaborated with the New Orleans Public Library so that their work would be widely available and accessible to the public, Mitchell said. They also joined with NOLA4Women to help promote the students’ work focused on the history of women in New Orleans.
“This project, driven mostly by ľֱ public history students, is a model for what service learning can do,” Mitchell said. “Not only did they learn from their community partners, but also ľֱ students have made real contributions to the shared historical memory of their city, with new or neglected stories that are more inclusive and represent the diversity and creativity of New Orleans.”
