Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans was largely shot before the Katrina tragedy but edited afterward, giving the film both a celebratory and elegiac tone. It is a film of such effortless intimacy, subtle glances and authentic details that only two native New Orleanians could have made it. Our guide through the neighborhood is New Orleans Time-Picayune reporter Lolis Eric Elie, who decided that rather than abandon his heritage he would invest in it by rehabilitating an old house in the Tremé district. His 75 year old contractor, Irving Trevigne, whose family has been in the construction business there for over 200 years, becomes a symbol of the neighborhood’s continuity and resourcefulness; Irving Trevigne represents a man who, unlike many Americans, is deeply rooted in his community and its traditions.

Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey and noted historians John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner explain what made Tremé different, such a fertile ground for African American life. New Orleans was a French and Spanish city before it was incorporated into the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Latin and urban attitudes towards slavery tended to be more relaxed than in the plantation South; slaves were allowed to walk freely through the city, to work for themselves and hence often to buy their freedom. New Orleans had the largest number of free people of color in the South, a dangerous anomaly in a slave society.

As the city outgrew its walls, a new district, Faubourg (suburb in French) Tremé was constructed, a mixed neighborhood, a majority of whose residents were free people of color. The district developed its own institutions, for example, St. Augustine ’s Church, the oldest predominantly black Catholic parish in the country. The district grew up around Congo Square where African American commerce flourished and a unique Creole culture emerged. Even today when Tremé’s children go “second lining” behind one of the city’s storied brass bands, their dances immediately reveal their African origins.

A century before the Harlem Renaissance and the modern Civil Rights Movement, Tremé was a center of black cultural and political ferment. In 1862, after Northern troops captured the city, Paul Trevigne, an ancestor of Irving , edited the oldest black-owned daily newspaper in the U.S. , The Tribune, which became an articulate advocate for African Americans’ civil rights. Before the 14th,15th and 16th Amendments, it demanded the right to enlist in the Union army, to vote and to be subject to equal treatment under the law. During the heady days of Reconstruction, black New Orleanians integrated the streetcars through sit-down strikes; it became the only city in the South with desegregated schools. At one point, more than half the state legislators were African Americans as well as the governor.

With the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877, however, white supremacists rapidly rolled back black gains. Separate and unequal schools were re-established and 99% of black citizens were purged from the voting rolls; anyone who protested was likely to be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. As a last stand in 1892, a “Citizens Committee” deliberately challenged a law resegregating all public transportation, the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson case. There the Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional, legalizing 60 years of American-style apartheid.

The black population was devastated but precisely during this dark period, a new kind of music was born in Faubourg Tremé – jazz. Legendary jazz great and New Orleans native, Wynton Marsalis observes that this music gave African Americans, excluded once again from mainstream American society, a free cultural space to voice their grief and hopes. The film pulsates with the resilient spirit of the residents of this quintessential New Orleans neighborhood, which has swept the world as America ’s most lasting contribution to music.

Tremé was a hotbed of New Orleans ’ civil rights struggles in the ‘50s and ‘60s but with its success prosperous residents began to move out. The familiar pattern of inner city urban decay set in – poverty, crime, drugs. Urban re-development rammed an interstate highway through the business center of the neighborhood and historic homes were replaced by demoralizing segregated housing projects. Faubourg Tremé even lost its name; now it was simply known as the Sixth Ward.

Then in late August, 2005, Katrina hit. The filmmakers revisited Tremé to survey the destruction and find out what had happened to the characters they had met during the film. The indifferent, incompetent federal response to the catastrophe left many residents angry and discouraged; once again, as with slavery and Jim Crow, America seemed to have rejected its African American residents. Some like Lolis Eric Elie returned and rebuilt. But Irving Trevigne, his life’s work in ruins, moved to Vermont where he died the next year. St. Augustine ’s church was given 18 months to recover its congregation or close.

A deeply moved but defiant Brenda Marie Osbey concludes, “This catastrophe is not greater than we as a people…Everywhere we go we must take with us the spirit of this city, the spirit of its heroes and the will to live and fight again.

Faubourg Tremé does not just commemorate, it reminds us that American society still confronts the same battles that the residents of Tremé have waged through two centuries - demands for economic justice, voting rights, equal education, decent public services, in short, full citizenship for African Americans.

This film is a co-production of Serendipity Films, LLC, Independent Television Service (ITVS), WYES TV12 New Orleans, Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB) and National Black Programming Consortium (NPBC). Major funding for this program was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, State of Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, The Ford Foundation, Southern Humanities Media Fund, Open Society Institute, LEH & others. For a complete list please go to www.tremedoc.com

"A stunning and powerful historical experience...Celebrates how black New Orleans, in the face of white hostility, managed to carve out a unique and expressive culture and history that would enrich America and the world."
-Leon Litwack, President, Southern Historical Association; Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley

"Flat out brilliant...This new documentary captures the real New Orleans on film. Richer and far more nuanced than Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke."
-The New Orleans Tribune