BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Lolis Eric Elie is a columnist for the New Orleans paper The Times Picayune, but his new film focuses on a single neighborhood and a different newspaper. The neighborhood, established some 200 years, is called the Faubourg Treme, a suburb that spilled out of the French Quarter. As Lolis Elie says, if you're not from there, you probably never heard of it.

But what he found in his research and tells in his film is a tale of national significance and a journalistic legacy nearly forgotten. He starts his story in the 19th century when the Faubourg Treme was a racially mixed community with a thriving population of free blacks.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Unlike the American tradition, the Spanish and the French had a tradition that allowed slaves to buy into the slave system, in a way. If you worked really hard, you could earn money and then buy your freedom.

Additionally, when you had free women of color who were wives or concubines of French men, often the offspring were not only free but sometimes well-to-do, if not wealthy. And a lot of the people who moved into the Faubourg Treme were free black people who then formed the culture and the politics of this community.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In fact, during slavery it had the largest community of free black people in the Deep South.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Indeed. New Orleans is amazing in that way. New Orleans was probably more integrated before the civil rights movement than it is now. That sense of "I'm going to the black part of town," you can say that now. You could not have said that 50 or 80 years ago in New Orleans.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So how your film began. You were renovating your house, with the help of Irving Trevigne who comes from a long line of New Orleans builders, and he tells you about a relative, an editor from the Treme, who launched a paper in 1862. His name was Paul.

LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Here it is 1862. New Orleans has fallen in the Civil War. Paul Trevigne, along with some other free people of color, launched a newspaper. At that point, it was a Republican Party organ, getting money in part from the Republican Party.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Of course, you mean the party of Lincoln.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Right, right. And when the Republicans pulled out in 1863, Paul Trevigne and his partners founded The Tribune, which became the first black daily newspaper in the United States.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The Tribune was a bilingual paper, right?
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Exactly. A lot of the people who were free in New Orleans were Creole. These are folks who'd been speaking French prior to the Louisiana Purchase. So The Union was the original paper, and it was in French, but then The Tribune was both in French and in English.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And if I picked up The Tribune in 1863, what would I have read?
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Much of it was attempting to get black men to join the Union cause, to actually fight in the Civil War. And, in fact, there were more black officers from Louisiana than from any other state in the union.

And also you get politics, people trying to convince you to register to vote and become a part of political activism.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And, as a matter of fact, we have a clip from your film of someone reading from The Tribune.
[CLIP] [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
We inaugurate today a new era in the South. We proclaim the Declaration of Independence as the basis for our platform. You who aspire to establish democracy without shackles, gather 'round us. Without fear and without hesitation, contribute your grain of sand to the construction of the temple of liberty.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Trevigne went further, far further than the Northern Abolitionists. He was calling for an end to segregation. He was calling for full citizenship, for the vote.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
What I found most striking was the fire in the words that these men were using, because what you got was in many ways not so much about that particular moment; it was about being able to express things freely which had been unexpressible in all the decades prior to that.

It in many ways was saying, we have been thinking all of these years. We've had ideas all of these years. We've had a desire for equality all these years. What has changed now is not us, but the moment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Trevigne decides to go for broke and he plans a legal challenge that ends up in the Supreme Court. This was 1892. What was Trevigne's plan?
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Trevigne's plan was to work with the railroad companies, because the railroad companies didn't like the Separate Car Act either. They didn't like having a separate car for black people. It's a lot of expense. It's a lot of trouble.

And what they wanted to do was be sure that Homer Plessy was arrested not for trespassing or disorderly conduct but for violating the Separate Car Act.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And they picked Homer Plessy, why?
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Homer Plessy was a cobbler and he grew up right near where I'm living now in the Faubourg Treme. And he was part of an activist community, and he looked white. And so the idea was, this is a totally ludicrous law. You can't even tell me whether or not this man is black or white yet you're going to discriminate against him based on this perception.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It bore a stunning resemblance, I thought, to that historic moment in the civil rights movement when activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and launched the Montgomery bus boycott.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Oh, the parallels between Homer Plessy and Rosa Parks are incredible. In both cases, the story that you get as a kid is Ms. Parks was just so tired, she couldn't get up, and Homer Plessy – no. These were people who sat for months and years trying to figure out how are we going to get this before the Supreme Court?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And so, Homer Plessy, this very light-skinned cobbler, agrees to sit in the wrong car. When he's questioned about his race, he says he's black, and he's booted.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Exactly. He's arrested. And the argument is that to discriminate against him in that way is contrary to the Constitution. Therefore it must be a Supreme Court case. And indeed they did have their day in court.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And that's the part of the story that most people do know. The Plessy vs. Ferguson case failed to sway the Supreme Court. His defeat codifies the Jim Crow laws for another 60 years.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
There's the great tragedy that separate but equal became the law of the land. But don't forget our notion that American history has been one steady march toward progress is shown to be false by the fact that there was all this promise and all this progress during the Reconstruction period that ultimately was thwarted with Plessy vs. Ferguson.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What does it mean to you to have unearthed this history?
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
I think much of New Orleans history has been discounted even by folks studying African-American history because they don't want to learn how to speak French and Spanish, and a lot of the documents were in French and Spanish.

Also, there's a sense that somehow we in New Orleans are another other. I mean, there's black and white and then there's “them people in New Orleans.”

Well, our point is that we have been very much a part of the struggle for civil rights in this country. And I think that if we can do anything for people like Paul Trevigne, we can honor their memory.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Lolis, thank you so much.
LOLIS ERIC ELIE:
Brooke, it's always a pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Lolis Eric Elie is a metro columnist for The New Orleans Times Picayune and co-director of "Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans."