Tremé / Lafitte
Storied Creole neighborhood whose corner kitchen fed civil rights strategy over bowls of gumbo.
Location
About this audio guide
In New Orleans's Tremé neighborhood, a restaurant that started as a small sandwich and lottery-ticket counter opened by Emily and Dooky Chase Senior in 1939 grew, under Leah Chase, into a fine-dining room where Black artists' paintings hung on the walls. The guide follows the Black lawyers and organizers who filed upstairs in the 1950s to plot the legal fight against segregation over bowls of gumbo, among them Thurgood Marshall, the Reverend A. L. Davis and Rudy Lombard. It traces how Leah Chase quietly seated white and Black guests together at a time state law forbade it, and how Martin Luther King Jr. later ate here between meetings.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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