Treme: The Oldest Black Neighborhood in America

Just north of the French Quarter, where the streets narrow and the shotgun houses line up close to the sidewalk and a brass band might turn a corner at any moment, is the Treme.

The Treme neighborhood has been the center of Black New Orleans life since the early nineteenth century, when free people of color built houses on these streets within walking distance of Congo Square, where they gathered on Sundays. It is documented by the Tulane Amistad Research Center as the oldest continuously Black-occupied neighborhood in the United States. That claim rests not on a moment of founding but on two centuries of continuous presence, disrupted by nothing, not by Civil War, not by Reconstruction, not by Jim Crow, not fully by Katrina, though Katrina came close.

What the Treme produced is not a list of buildings. It is a living system: the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, mutual-aid organizations that date from the late nineteenth century and that organize the second-line parades that follow the funerals of musicians through these streets, with brass bands playing jazz standards while the mourners dance behind them. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition, which centers in this neighborhood. The families, the Marsalises and the Baptistes and the dozens of others less famous, who have passed musical knowledge from generation to generation for more than a hundred years.

After Katrina, the Treme took water. Some residents did not return. The gentrification pressure that followed the recovery brought new residents who could pay more for the houses than the people who had always lived there. The Backstreet Cultural Museum, which Sylvester Francis built over decades of collecting suits and photographs and club records and second-line documentation, is one anchor that remained. The people who created what this neighborhood is are still in it, alongside the people who came because of what it is.

The tension between those two groups is not resolved. It may not be resolvable. But the tradition continues, because the tradition has always continued here, under conditions far worse than a real estate market.