Making Modern New Orleans - Robert Tucker

Robert Tucker

10/14/24 • 58 min

In this episode, Jack and Justin discuss their interview with New Orleans political insider and businessman Robert Tucker. As a young army veteran and civil rights activist, Tucker joined the 1969 mayoral campaign of Maurice "Moon" Landrieu and eventually served as the city's first African American deputy mayor. Landrieu came to rely on Tucker when it came to navigating conflict and change in the 1970s including the dramatic days surrounding the Black Panther standoff in the Desire Housing Project and the tragic Mark Essex incident.

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Lolis Edward Elie

Jack and JustinCreators & Guests

Jack Davis - Host
Justin Nystrom - Producer

interviewed noted civil rights attorney and political observer Lolis Edward Elie at his home on Henriette DeLille Street on November 16, 2012. Born in the neighborhood known today as the "Black Pearl" in 1930, Lolis Elie grew up doing all manner of odd jobs, from waiting tables and caddying at the nearby Audubon Park Golf Course to shining shoes at the corner of St. Charles and Broadway. By his own admission, he didn't set out to "become some Civil Rights attorney," that he "didn't want to spend the rest of my life shining shoes." In 1959, he became one of the earlier African American graduates of Loyola University New Orleans's Law School and went out immediately to set up a practice with Loyola classmate Nils Douglas and Robert Collins on what is today Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. He played a pivotal role in the jurisprudence of desegregation and was a tireless civic advocate of equity for the people of New Orleans. Elie passed away in April 4, 2017.

In this episode, Elie discusses his involvement with the desegregation of Canal Street, the perspectives of Civil Rights activists on the pivotal mayoral election of 1969-70, the disruption to Black New Orleans communities brought by Interstate 10 and Armstrong Park, the rediscovery of music and especially food culture in the 1970s, and his work with Rudy Lombard on the classic volume Creole Feast.

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Ben C. Toledano

This week Jack and Justin talk about their 2013 interview with self-exiled New Orleanian and iconoclast, Ben C. Toledano. Whether you agree or disagree with his point of view, it would be difficult to find a more interesting or complicated individual than Toledano. Born to one of the city's old families, he grew over time to see the failings of what he would describe as an insulated and intellectually incurious elite. He was an early Republican at a time when the Democratic Party dominated Louisiana politics, a talented lawyer who was happier discussing literature, and someone who loved the city so much that he couldn't bear to live here anymore. In this episode Toledano talks about what he saw as the hypocrisy of the political establishment, his unprecedented challenge to Moon Landrieu in the 1970 mayoral election, the failings of the elite institutions like the Boston Club, and literary figures like his friend Walker Percy.