The first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States was The New Orleans Tribune, which began in 1864, during the Civil War. The founder was Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez.
La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orle’ans, the New Orleans Tribune, was originally published in both French and English. Jean-Charles Houzeau, a Belgian scientist, was the managing editor and principal writer. The paper closed on February 28, 1869.
During its brief but significant run, The Tribune gained a national reputation from its editorials and because its editors sent free copies of the paper to major Northern newspapers and to every member of Congress, who often quoted the editorials on the floor of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives.
The Tribune was a vocal advocate for the interests of free black people of New Orleans in the final year of the American Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction. The Tribune promoted the right of African American children to access public education and the right of newly freed farm workers to decent wages and working conditions.
In 1985 Dr. Dwight and Beverly McKenna began publishing a monthly news magazine The New Orleans Tribune focused on the African-American community. The Tribune has earned a reputation for reporting on social, economic, and political issues often ignored by the mainstream press.
My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune by
David C. Rankin teaches American history at the University of California at Irvine. Gerard F. Denault is associate director of the Freshman Seminar Program at Harvard University.
Faubourg Tremé by
Long ago during slavery, Faubourg Tremé was home to the largest community of free black people in the Deep South and a hotbed of political ferment. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor co-habitated, collaborated, and clashed to create much of what defines New Orleans culture up to the present day. Founded as a suburb (or faubourg in French) of the original colonial city, the neighborhood developed during French rule and many families like the Trevignes kept speaking French as their first language until the late 1960s. Tremé was the home of the Tribune, the first black daily newspaper in the US. During Reconstruction, activists from Tremé pushed for equal treatment under the law and for integration. And after Reconstruction's defeat, a "Citizens Committee" legally challenged the resegregation of public transportation resulting in the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court case. New Orleans Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie bought a historic house in Tremé in the 1990s when the area was struggling to recover from the crack epidemic. Rather than flee the blighted inner city, Elie begins renovating his dilapidated home and in the process becomes obsessed with the area's mysterious and neglected past. Shot largely before Hurricane Katrina and edited afterwards, the film is both celebratory and elegiac in tone.