Dooky Chase Restaurant
Creole dining room where a nineteen sixty-five bombing failed to stop secret civil rights strategy sessions upstairs.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Dooky Chase Restaurant in New Orleans opens with a car slowing outside the door on Orleans Avenue in May 1965 and a homemade bomb going off at the entrance. It traces why the restaurant became a target: Leah and Edgar Chase quietly let black and white New Orleanians sit and eat together upstairs, defying the city's segregation laws, while organizers including Jerome Smith, Oretha Castle Haley and Rudy Lombard planned lunch counter protests behind an unmarked door. Martin Luther King himself passed through those same doors for strategy sessions. Stand at that corner and you're looking at the door that took the blast.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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