In chapter two of the A City through Their Eyes series, The Life of a Historian tells the story of Pontchartrain Park through the eyes of Rosa Keller. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Keller helped fund and initiate the construction of one of the first middle-class African American neighborhoods in the South.

“I walk in two worlds”:

Rosa Keller, Pontchartrain Park, and Moving beyond Race and Class

Portrait of Rosa Keller, c. 1960s
(Source: State Library of Louisiana Historic Photograph Collection, State Library of Louisiana)

From Silver Spoon to Activism

As the daughter of A.B. Freeman, a Coca-Cola tycoon, Rosa Keller was born with the proverbial ‘silver spoon’ in her mouth. However, Keller ultimately rejected the easy life of a socialite in high society. Instead, she favored a challenging, but rewarding career as a social and political activist.

Born in 1911, it was not until 1932 when she married Charles Keller, Jr., a Jewish military officer, that Rosa Keller believed she had begun to learn “a lot about prejudice.” Still, as Keller recalled in 1978, “it was World War II that woke us up.” In the wake of the war, Keller remembered thinking, “I could see the seeds of what got Germany in such terrible trouble right here.”[1]

As the war broke out, Keller waded into the waters of social and political activism.

She never looked back.

If you spend your life playing bridge, or belonging to a garden club, I don’t believe that you can have a satisfied old age.” – Rosa Keller, 1978.

Long a member of New Orleans’s economic elite, Keller slowly but surely began to recognize the privileges afforded to her because of her race and class. Consequently, she began to view her participation “in interracial politics as a cause’ and an ‘education.'”[2]

As a cause, Keller wielded her influence and personal connection with the white, economic elite of New Orleans as a political weapon for social change.

For example, as a close friend of Judge J. Skelly Wright, Keller may have influenced Judge Wright’s feelings on racial equality and education. Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Judge Wright routinely ruled against local institutions trying to block desegregation. Additionally, she helped black leaders bypass barriers to gain access to white businessmen in New Orleans. Black leaders took full advantage of Keller’s social connections in their efforts to convince white businesses to hire African Americans.

As an education, Keller learned just how far-reaching the effects of racism were in American society.

For example, as a member and later president of the Urban League, Keller initially found it odd that some African Americans were not registered voters, nor did they plan on registering. However, black members soon shared their stories of racial violence. They explained to her that voting as a black American often came at a price, one that most whites were fortunate to never have to pay.

Well, I just don’t want to get killed yet.” – Unnamed black Urban League member answering a question about his voter registration status.

According to historian Kim Lacy Rogers, throughout her life, Keller “used her considerable influence, charm, and political capital to push for” social and political change within New Orleans.[3]

As an activist, Keller supported the effort to desegregate the public libraries of New Orleans during the 1950s. During the 1960-1961 school crisis, she advocated for public schools to remain open. She participated in voter registration drives and encouraged African American political participation. Keller also regularly financed lawsuit around integration, including that of Tulane University.[4]

Before Keller “achieved a reputation as a race-relations pioneer” of New Orleans, however, she began her activist career more modestly.[5] During War World II, she started volunteering and then serving on the board of several local organizations that including the Urban League, the League of Women Voters, and the Young Women’s Christian Association.

A Problem of Housing and the Building of a Neighborhood

Then, in 1947 at a dinner party by her friends Edith and Edgar Stern, Keller overheard one of their servants lamenting the loss of his home to a fire and the difficulty of finding affordable, quality housing in New Orleans.

Like most cities following World War II, New Orleans suffered from a housing shortage. Disproportionately, African Americans bore/felt the consequences. The housing crisis Keller learned about that evening, however, began in the 1930s with the organized and intentional effort of federal housing agencies and programs.

Together, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) worked to underfund black communities and characterize all African Americans as credit risks. The product of New Deal legislation, the HOLC and the FHA were formed to protect homeowners from foreclosure and provide financial insurance to lenders. While the HOLC and the FHA performed their duties well enough for white homeowners, both agencies actively worked against African American families and individuals.

1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Residential Security Map of New Orleans
(Source: “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America,” University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab)

The HOLC, through its City Survey Program, secretively created residential security maps. HOLC residential security maps outlined and graded neighborhoods based on their potential risks for federal monetary lending and real estate investment. Grades included: “A-Best” (green), “B-Still Desirable” (blue), “C-Definitely Declining” (yellow), and “D-Hazardous” (red). HOLC appraisers routinely marked black neighborhoods as ‘D’ (red) or, at best, ‘C’ (yellow).

The FHA used HOLC residential security maps to determine the creditworthiness of African American families and individuals. This meant that African Americans, regardless of their financial standing, were deemed ineligible for FHA mortgages. Consequently, the practice of ‘redlining’ led to the deterioration of black neighborhoods and effectively limited the opportunities available to African Americans to buy quality homes. Moreover, ‘redlining’ helped cement patterns of residential segregation that persist and adversely affect black communities still to this day.[6]

Yet, what bothered Keller most upon learning about the housing shortage in New Orleans that evening was the fact that banks regularly denied the mortgage applications of African Americans. Because of redlining practices, banks viewed black families and individuals as a bad credit risk.

Outraged, Keller took the first steps in initiating what would become her first major attempt at addressing the larger structural and societal symptoms of racial and economic inequality: Pontchartrain Park, “one of the first suburban-style subdivisions developed for African Americans in the segregated South.”[7]

What would become a common practice throughout her life as an activist, Keller drew upon her wealth and social connections among New Orleans’s economic elite. As historian Kim Lacy Rogers has noted “Pontchartrain Park represented a significant financial risk for” Keller, who “invested a great deal of the money.”[8]

I walk in two worlds.” – Rosa Keller on her role as an activist; upper-class whites formed one world and African American activists characterized the other.

Along with her friends the Sterns–Edith’s father was Julius Rosenwald, co-founder of Sears, Roebuck, & Company–Keller, first, financed a housing survey put together by J. Westbrook McPherson, president of the Urban League. McPherson’s survey was meant to show that a large number of African Americans were willing and financially able to buy homes in New Orleans. Following the survey’s completion in 1954, Keller took the findings to Mayor DeLesseps “Chep” Morrison proving to him and others “that there was a ready market of potential black homeowners in New Orleans.”[9]

Nonetheless, racial prejudices and financial obstacles to the construction of a suburban-style subdivision for affluent blacks remained steadily in place. Undeterred, Keller made it known to Morrison that Keller and the Sterns were prepared “to finance the construction of homes for blacks.”[10] With Keller, an affluent white, financially backing the development of Pontchartrain Park, Morrison seemed persuaded enough to appeal to the FHA. In turn, the FHA now proved willing to provide government-insured mortgages to African American families and individuals.

(Source: Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans)

Pontchartrain Park opened in 1955 with the construction of the neighborhood completed entirely by 1961. Though other groups and individuals greatly contributed to the development of Pontchartrain Park, Keller’s role was paramount. Moreover, because of her relentless advocacy and financial contributions in addressing housing inequality, Keller earned the trust of black leaders and groups, who initially voiced opposition to the development of a blacks-only neighborhood.

Although a white woman of wealth, Keller chose to oppose the “ignorance and hostility of whites of her own social class.”[11] By doing so, she also challenged the gendered politics of 1950s New Orleans to build bridges across class and racial divisions.[12]

Additional Resources

Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation’s National Register Database

Pontchartrain Park Historic District

Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans (PRC)

“The History and Politics behind Pontchartrain Park”

University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab

“Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America”

Cited Sources

[1] Kim Lacy Rogers, Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 26.

[2] Kim Lacy Rogers, “Life Questions: Memories of Women Civil Rights Leaders,” The Journal of African American History 87, no. 3 (July 2002), 366.

[3] Rogers, “Life Questions,” 355.

[4] Rogers, “Life Questions,” 355.

[5] Rogers, Righteous Lives, 28.

[6] See Bruce Mitchell and Juan Franco, “HOLC “Redlining” Maps: The Persistent Structure Of Segregation And Economic Inequality,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition, https://ncrc.org/holc/.

[7] “The History and Politics behind Pontchartrain Park,” Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, https://prcno.org/resources/pontchartrain-park/.

[8] Rogers, Righteous Lives, 27.

[9] Farrah D. Gafford, “‘It Was a Real Village’: Community Identity Formation among Black Middle-Class Residents in Pontchartrain Park,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (January 2013), 43.

[10] Gafford, “‘It Was a Real Village,’” 44.

[11] Rogers, Righteous Lives, 28.

[12] See Pamela Tyler, Silk Stockings & Ballot Boxes: Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920-1963 (Athens: London, 1996).

In chapter one of the A City through Their Eyes series, The Life of a Historian explores how free and enslaved women used the colonial marketplace to their advantage. Starting from a familiar space, Congo Square (Place des Nègres), this post reveals that as entrepreneurs  African women and women of African descent redefined the racial and gendered power dynamics of French and Spanish New Orleans.

Women in the Marketplace of Congo Square:

 Challenging the Racial and Gender Power Dynamics of French and Spanish New Orleans

A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color – Agostino Brunias, c. 1769
(Source: Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art)

The Marketplace that was Congo Square

Located at what is now Louis Armstrong Park in the neighborhood of Tremé, Congo Square has long been accepted as a place of cultural significance throughout New Orleans’ history. Most famously, many remember this public space as a site where free and enslaved Africans and people of African descent from the city and surrounding areas gathered on free Sundays.

The 1724 French Code Noir, a set of laws regulating the practice of slavery in French colonies, granted enslaved persons Sundays as a non-laboring day. While free days for enslaved persons was not an uncommon practice throughout the Atlantic world, historians Kimberly S. Hanger and Jerah Johnson suggest that practice in New Orleans was exceptional. According to both Hanger and Johnson, under “both French and Spanish rulers the colony’s purpose was primarily strategic” in that “neither wanted Britain to seize it.”[1] As production of agriculture and raw materials was not the primary colonial goal, staple crops and other essential goods were often scarce and not readily available. As a result, European colonists depended on the crops and goods enslaved people produced and sold on their days off. Johnson even argues “that slaves there came early to be recognized as having the right to use their free time virtually as they saw fit.”[2]

At Congo Square, then, free and enslaved Africans and people of African descent used their day off to take part in African traditions of dance, music, commerce, and sacred rituals. The lasting cultural influence of Congo Square can still be heard in jazz music today.

Dancing in Congo Square – Edward Winsor Kemble, 1886

Nonetheless, some historians have come to question the totality of freedom in Congo Square, especially after the United States acquired the city of New Orleans. In Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions, historian Rashauna Johnson argues that Congo Square “was a physical playground for imagined blackness that, like the slave markets…only steps away, gave free persons an opportunity to enjoy a curated and contained blackness.”[3] Within this curated and contained blackness, the power structure of New Orleans slave society still reigned supreme. In other words, the cultural expression of Congo Square served to associate blackness with enslavement, thus, strengthening the connections between free and white. Even still, Johnson writes “in Congo Square people of African descent reclaimed their bodies and created communities.”[4]

More importantly, and for the A City through Their Eyes series, Congo Square provided a space where enslaved women were able to sell goods and crops. The money they earned within the marketplaces of French and Spanish New Orleans gave free and enslaved women the political and economic power to shape their lives within a society intent on controlling their bodies absolutely.

Before Congo Square emerged as a site of African cultural expression during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it started as a market for enslaved people. From the 1740s and on, enslaved people flocked to this market space to sell and trade goods like fish and game or pecan pies and molasses candy. Buyers who often bought goods from the market included not only other enslaved people, but also white colonists, free persons of color, and local Native Americans.

Women, in general, played a prominent role in town markets, but African-American women became perhaps the most influential buyers and sellers of food in New Orleans.” – Ethnohistorian Daniel H. Usner in Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 202.

While the Code Noir granted enslaved Africans and people of African descent Sundays off from labor, it also ” expressly forbade…slaves to own any kind of property, to conduct any kind of trade on their own account, to gather in large groups, or to hunt or sell goods…without written permission.”[5] However, both enslaved entrepreneurs and French colonial authorities recognized that enslaved entrepreneurs “provided much needed supplies to a city frequently, if not chronically, short of foodstuffs.”[6] So, even though illegal, because white colonialists were dependent on the market, enslaved women effectively forced white authorities to accept the political and economic legitimacy of their marketplace.

Even after Spain took possession of New Orleans, the market persisted but was still within this legal limbo of political and economic legitimacy. In fact, under Spanish rule, the market flourished as the economy improved and the population of New Orleans increased. Still, the power structure of New Orleans remained firmly entrenched in the hands of white colonialists.

Fortunately, however, the emergence of enslaved entrepreneurs dovetailed with the introduction of Spanish rule, thus, Spanish laws and customs governing the institution of slavery. As historian Kimberly S. Hanger notes, “it was in New Orleans that Spanish laws protecting slaves and free blacks and advancing their interests came to full force.”[7]

Plan of the City of New Orleans and Adjacent Plantations
(Copy and Translation from the Original Spanish Plan dated 1798, showing the City of New Orleans)
– Alexander Debrunner and Charles Laveau Trudeau, c. 1875
(Source: Library of Congress)

Under Spanish rule, then, “enslaved people found more opportunities to gain freedom” and “more opportunities to earn money for self-purchase as the economy improved.”[8]

The Political Power of the Purse

The economic power and wealth enslaved women earned from the marketplace allowed many to purchase their freedom. In fact, during Spanish New Orleans, self-purchase was among one of the most common and frequent ways enslaved women used to claim the rightful power over their bodies.[9] Some women even accumulated enough wealth to buy the freedom of their loved ones as well. For example, Margarite Trudeau, who as a businesswoman was able to purchase her freedom before acquiring enough money to free her son from bondage.[10]

African women and women of African descent continued their entrepreneurial lifestyles even after self-purchase. As free businesswomen, African women and women of African proved even more formidable. Their financial success even impelled white shopkeepers on occasion to petition the municipal council to enact market regulations for their benefit. Other times, white businessmen acknowledged the business acumen of black women that led to a few successful business ventures. For example, Antonio Sanchez formed a partnership with Maria Juana Ester, who previously as an enslaved entrepreneur had purchased her freedom. Together they owned and operated a retail business in New Orleans.[11]

Thus, as entrepreneurs, free and enslaved African women and women of African descent challenged the racial and gendered hierarchy of New Orleans, one purposely constructed to strip them of their autonomy.

Additional Resources

Louisiana Digital Library

“Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past”

National Park Service – NPGallery Digital Asset Management System

Congo Square – National Register of Historic Places Registration Form

Jackson Square – National Register of Historic Places Registration Form

Cited Sources

[1] Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 6.

[2] Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 32, no. 2 (Spring 1991), 124.

[3] Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 117.

[4] Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis, 121.

[5] Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square,” 129.

[6] Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square,” 129.

[7] Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 5.

[8] Leslie M. Harris, “Urban Slavery,” Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice, http://www.slavery.amdigital.co.uk.utk.idm.oclc.org/Essays/content/LeslieHarrisEssay.aspx.

[9] Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 28.

[10] Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 63.

[11] Kimberly S. Hanger, “Landlords, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Slave-Owners: Free Black Female Property-Holders in Colonial New Orleans,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 223.