Memorial Practices of New Orleans

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

RHETORICAL BURIALS: MEMORIAL PRACTICES OF NEW ORLEANS

A Dissertation in

Communication Arts and Sciences

J. David Maxson

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2018 ii

The dissertation of J. David Maxson was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Debra Hawhee McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation Professor of English and Communication Arts and Sciences Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Michele Kennerly Assistant Professor Communication Arts and Sciences and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies

Stephen H. Browne Liberal Arts Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences

Matthew Jordan Associate Professor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications

Kirt H. Wilson Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and African American Studies Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

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ABSTRACT

Contests over public memory are complex, dynamic, political, and rhetorical. The interdisciplinary study of public memory has, in fact, occupied scholars in rhetoric for the past quarter century. By focusing on the public and social qualities of most memorial practices, contemporary rhetoricians have emphasized the contingent nature of the past, drawn attention to the judgments made to select and sustain memories, and explored the persuasive power of leveraging past events in service of present needs. But why do some memories crop up at unexpected times? What happens when memories are adopted by the very institutions that formerly disavowed and suppressed them? How can scholars in rhetoric studies help explain the opportunistic resurgence of public memories or the deliberate dismissal of traumatic pasts? In order to answer these questions, this dissertation builds from and draws together extensive interdisciplinary conversations in history, geography, sociology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and rhetoric studies to analyze public memorial practices in New Orleans. More specifically, the case studies in each chapter explore how New Orleans’ funerary rituals—from jazz funerals to cenotaphic naming—are used for commemorative purposes other than mourning and burying the dead. In this study, bodily movement and sound rhetorically express public memory in liminal moments of transition, animating alternative presents, envisioning productive futures, claiming space for the living, maintaining memories of the departed, and defining who is invited to remember.

Organized thematically, the first two chapters explore commemorations for the unacknowledged dead, while the final two chapters examine the ritualized burial of traumatic pasts through New Orleans’ musical funerary traditions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vi

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Public Memory in New Orleans ...... 5 Rhetorical Field Methods ...... 7 Writing About New Orleans ...... 17 Preview of Chapters ...... 21

CHAPTER ONE. Burying the King Again: Buddy Bolden’s Jazz Funeral and Defleshed Memory ...... 33 Defleshed Memory...... 35 Muting Buddy Bolden...... 38 Jazz Funerals, Democracy, and Public Mourning ...... 43 The Buddy Bolden Planning Committee ...... 49 Cutting the Body Loose ...... 53

CHAPTER TWO. St. Anna’s Murder Board: Memorializing New Orleans’ Victims of Violence ...... 69 Cenotaphic Naming ...... 73 “Paying Faithful Attention” ...... 75 Humanizing Through Inscription ...... 81 Prompting Reactions ...... 87 Ever-Expanding Memorial ...... 90

CHAPTER THREE. “Burying the Past”: Dillard University’s Jazz Funeral for Katrina .....104 Scarred Landscapes ...... 106 “Gleaming White and Spacious Green” ...... 112 Burying Katrina ...... 120 “Getting Past the Katrina Story” ...... 127

CHAPTER FOUR. “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy”: Take ’Em Down NOLA, Absent, Monuments and Residual Memories ...... 144 Rhetoric of Absent Monuments ...... 147 The Liberty Place Monument ...... 152 “We Are One Band, One Sound”: Mobilizing Residual Memory ...... 162 Residual Memories, Activist Communities, and Monuments to White Supremacy ...... 169

CONCLUSION ...... 182

REFERENCES ...... 195

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

I.1. Da Truth Brass Band outside of City Park ...... 3

2.1. Close up of St. Anna’s Murder Board ...... 69

2.2. Close up of handwritten names on St. Anna’s Murder Board ...... 71

2.3. Missing panel from the garden wall portion of the Murder Board ...... 91

2.4. Pulse Night Club entry on the Murder Board ...... 95

3.1. House with bullet hole painted on it and steps leading to nothing ...... 109

3.2. Dillard University’s Avenue of the Oaks ...... 117

3.3. “Jazz Funeral: Burying the Past” handkerchief and procession ...... 121

4.1. Rev. Alexander at the 1993 rededication of the Liberty Place Monument ...... 157

4.2. NOPD dragging Rev. Alexander out of City Hall in 1964 ...... 159

C.1. Google Maps screenshots of the Liberty Place Monument...... 186

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing a dissertation is a process that requires countless acts of kindness to complete. Thanks to the New Orleanians who both inspired this project and helped make it happen. Thanks to Sarah Adams, Cory Geraths, and Mudiwa Pettus for your insightful feedback and for making accountability so much fun. Debra Hawhee’s writing group has a special knack for finding and refining arguments in the most hopeless drafts. Thanks to Kris

Lotier, Kyle King, Jo Hsu, Sarah Adams, Megan Poole, Curry Kennedy, and Ashley Rea for your charitable criticism.

Thanks to folks at Tulane University for sharing your intellectual community with me. I am especially grateful to Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Alaina W. Hébert, and Lynn Abbott for guiding me through the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive and providing me with a Björn

Bärnheim Research Fellowship. Thanks to the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, especially Rebecca Snedeker, Denise Frazier, and Joel Dinerstein for supporting my research in New Orleans with a Gulf South Fellowship. Thanks, also, to Matt Sakakeeny and T.R.

Johnson whose genuine interest in this project, even in its earliest stages, encouraged me to do good work.

Thanks to Davis Houck, Jennifer Mercieca, and Robert Asen for their generous feedback during the NCA Doctoral Honors Seminar in 2016. Thanks to Michael Butterworth,

Charles Morris III, and Jeffrey A. Bennett for making me feel welcome as a scholar. Thanks, also, to Charles Taylor and Rick Maxson for teaching me the fundamentals of rhetorical criticism.

Special thanks to the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana

University. CMCL shaped who I am as a scholar in profound ways. Thanks to Phaedra

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Pezzullo, Robert Terrill, John Lucaites, Bob Ivie, and Ted Striphas for showing me the ropes.

Thanks, also, to my peers in CMCL who taught me how to be a graduate student and are teaching me to be a scholar. Shout out to Isaac Rooks, Sara Gray, Beth Kaszynski Gilmore,

Martin Law, Philip Perdue, Katie Lind, and Saul Kutnicki.

Penn State supported my research in countless ways. Thanks to the Center for

Humanities and Information for a predoctoral research fellowship. Thanks to the College of

Liberal Arts and the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences for providing multiple travel grants and research awards that made this dissertation possible. Thanks, also, to the

Alumni Association for awarding me a dissertation award. Special thanks to Kirt Wilson for helping me navigate the CIC process so I could come to Penn State in the first place.

Donna and Steve Smith, Kristin and Doug Varella, Brenda and Bob Whitaker, and

Leah and Matt Wooden literally opened their homes to me in Bloomington. Anne-Elise and

Alex Brian did the same in New Orleans. I am forever grateful for their kindness. Thanks to

Travis Brisini and Adam Cody for grabbing lunch with me once a week. I can’t describe how much those meals mean to me. Thanks to Jeremy Fuzy, Al Doyle, and Matt Frierdich for your unwavering friendship. Also, thanks to Kathy Teige and Letitia Bullock for your patience, diligence, and unflagging support.

My committee deserves special credit for making this dissertation happen. Thanks to

Michele Kennerly whose writing—in publications and emails—inspires me to write rigorously, joyfully, and creatively. Thanks to Stephen H. Browne for introducing me to public memory studies and showing me how to write stories for academic audiences. Thanks to Matthew Jordan for sharing my enthusiasm for jazz. I am eternally grateful to Debra

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Hawhee for her superhuman guidance, attention, energy, and focus. Debbie, I cannot imagine a better advisor.

My father ended the acknowledgements page of his dissertation by saying that he owed the greatest debt of gratitude to my mother, brother, sister, and myself. He wrote, “This dissertation is a testimony of their sacrifice and support.” Almost twenty years later, I feel the same way. My dissertation would not be possible without the love, kindness, generosity, and contagious curiosity of my family. Thanks to my in-laws, Cynthia Law, David Law, Aaron

Law, Sam Law, and Max Law, for welcoming me into the family. Thanks to my wonderful sister-in-law Ann Maxson and the charming Gregory Pancake for being the best. My mother,

Kittilu Dodds, taught me the joy of teaching. My father, Rick Maxson, showed me that rhetoric can change the world for the better. My brother, Stan Maxson, makes me laugh until

I cry and inspires me with his wit and determination. My sister, Natalie Maxson, is outrageously smart, thoughtful, and playfully determined to outshine her brothers. Finally, my wife, Amanda Law Maxson, makes me a better person every day with her hard work, caring spirit, and beautiful smile. Amanda, Natalie, and Stan are my best friends. This dissertation is a testimony of their sacrifice and support.

For Amanda, Stan, and Natalie

INTRODUCTION

On May 19, 2017, a masked and body-armored crew of construction workers began their day-long labor of removing a 16½-foot-tall statue of Robert E. Lee from a 60-foot Doric column in New Orleans, Louisiana.1 Times-Picayune reporters provided live-streaming coverage of the construction crew’s efforts, monitoring every subtle adjustment of equipment for indications of progress.2 Unlike the disassembly of the Liberty Place Monument and statues of Jefferson Davis and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard that occurred over the previous three and a half weeks, the mayor’s officepublicly announce the removal of Lee’s statue the night before. The other monuments came down without warning in the dead of night. Despite City Hall’s secrecy, each of the previous three monuments drew large crowds of onlookers who loudly voiced their approval or disapproval of the city government’s actions.

When construction crews showed up at the entrance of City Park two days earlier in the pre-dawn darkness to take down the third statue, this one of P.G.T. Beauregard, New

Orleanians set up camping chairs along the banks of Bayou St. John, some paddled kayaks on the bayou to get a better look, while others gathered beside barricades erected by the New

Orleans Police Department along the circus intersection of North Carrolton Avenue,

Esplanade Avenue, and Wisner Boulevard. The six-ton statue of Beauregard3—the only native New Orleanian represented in the removed Confederate statuary—depicted the

Confederate general wearing his uniform astride a charger. The statue faced southeast down

Esplanade Avenue, gazing out over a street lined with live oaks and historic cottages built by

New Orleans’ French Creole social elite.

As construction crews worked on Beauregard’s statue, celebrating anti-monument demonstrators, including founding members of the grassroots activist organization Take ’Em

Down NOLA, joined forces with Da Truth Brass Band playing New Orleans second line standards.4 Mardi Gras Indian chants were especially popular with the crowd. “Let’s Go Get

’Em” and “Ho Na Nae” were particularly well-suited to the occasion. Demonstrators replaced the standard refrain of “ho-na-nae” with the words “take ’em down” while simply adding “take ’em down” as a response to the refrain “let’s go get ’em.”5 Second liners crowded around the band dancing and clapping exuberantly.

As they would during lulls in a second line parade, Da Truth’s trumpeters periodically injected Joe Avery’s riff into the music as a call and response that engaged the crowd—“Ba- da-daaaaaa-da! Hey!”6 In this context, Joe Avery’s riff invited the expression of collective celebratory reflexes trained by exposure to New Orleans’ street parading traditions. In the words of jazz writers Berry, Foose, and Jones, the “language of music” in New Orleans creates a sense of “rootedness” in the city and its traditions.7 This musical vocabulary cues prescribed communal participation that redefines places and events through sonic saturation and bodily movement.8 Taken together, this brass band and their second liners powerfully and collectively reasserted control over public space that, since 1915, was dominated by conspicuous symbols of white supremacy—“Ba-da-daaaaa-da! Hey!”

New Orleanian activists and reporters took note of the brass band’s dramatic arrival on the scene. Writer, teacher, poet, and native New Orleanian Clint Smith III took to Twitter following Da Truth Brass Band’s second line appearance at Beauregard’s removal. In a series of tweets, Smith wrote, “I love that my city celebrated the removal of PGT Beauregard’s statue with a brass band & second line. So emblematic of New Orleans’ spirit.” He added,

“Sometimes the best way to fight against bigotry is to show how it won’t strip away your joy, it can’t remove that which is most human.” Smith concluded this train of thought with a bit of levity, tweeting, “Next time someone says the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, I won’t show them empirical evidence, I’ll just blow a trombone in their face.”9 The Gambit, a weekly New Orleans news and entertainment periodical, picked up on a similar dynamic at play between the two sets of demonstrators. In a tweet at 2:31 a.m., The Gambit juxtaposed the brass band-led celebrations with the dower countenance of Confederate flag-waving demonstrators—who reportedly sang “God Bless America” at their opponents before Da

Truth arrived.10 The Gambit’s tweet contained two pictures with the simple caption, “Both

sidesFigure of I .1.the Photos barricade:” of Da Truth (see Brass Figure Band I.1 and). In second response liners juxtaposedto The Gambit’s with pro -tweet,monument “Editilla the Pun” demonstrators gathered outside City Park during P.G.T. Beauregard’s pre-dawn removal. Photos by The insightfullyGambit, May replied, 17, 2017. “1st Rule of NOLA Street Theater: Can’t argue with a Brass Band.”11

This was not the first time a brass band showed up to mark the removal of a Jim

Crow-era statue. Just weeks earlier, Take ’Em Down NOLA, the grassroots activist organization committed to the removal of all symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans, staged a “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy” following the disassembly of the Liberty

Place Monument—this second line is the subject of chapter four. Since Take ’Em Down

NOLA’s staged second line, brass bands showed up at every statue removal, including

Robert E. Lee’s. However, when Lee came down, the historical preservationists and white nationalists who were loudly present at nighttime removals in the previous weeks were nowhere to be seen in the light of day. There was no spectacular competition between opposing demonstrators. Instead, a crowd of mostly locals brought camping chairs, umbrellas for shade, and watched as history unfolded.

In the afternoon, one Times-Picayune reporter walked the camera over to a nearby

Circle K gas station on Howard Street where a crowd gathered in the shade. Standing beside gas pumps, a brass band—consisting of two trumpets, a trombone, an alto saxophone, and a snare drummer—played the jazz standard, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” After a short break, the band struck up the Star-Spangled Banner, but in a slow and mournful minor key.

The brass band transposed the national anthem into a funeral dirge.12 Clearly, New Orleans brass band traditions—popularly associated with both collective grief and celebration—are significant rhetorical resources in more than just their iconic uses in jazz funerals and Mardi

Gras parades.

In New Orleans, the phrase “second line” is loaded with significance. A second line could refer to the back-half of a jazz funeral, an annual parade sponsored by a social aid and pleasure club, a popular song associated with Mardi Gras, a type of dance, or some permutation of all of the above. In this project, unless otherwise noted, the phrase second line is used broadly to describe a celebratory street parade with a form that is modeled off of the annual parades put on by New Orleans’ various social aid and pleasure clubs. A unifying characteristic of second lines is that they are led by brass bands that process through the streets of New Orleans playing exuberant music. New Orleans’ second lines are important in this study because they are material expressions of public memory that rhetorically fuse

5 bodily movement, sound, and space. Second lines used for commemorative purposes, as this project will demonstrate, mark liminal moments of transition, animating alternative presents, envisioning productive futures, claiming space for the living, maintaining memories of the departed, and defining who is invited to remember.

Public Memory in New Orleans

The removal of Jim Crow-era statuary in New Orleans was, in large part, a battle over the city’s public memory. Contests over public memory are complex, dynamic, political, and rhetorical. The interdisciplinary study of public memory has, in fact, occupied scholars in rhetoric for the past quarter century. Such devotion in the field is far from surprising given that memory is one of the five canons of rhetoric and, since at least the Hellenistic Period, has been considered an integral component of a well-rounded rhetorical education.

Scholars taking up the study of public memory have long been concerned with the recovery of nearly lost memories. In fact, the systematic study of memory often begins with a bit of ancient lore about uncovering and identifying human remains. The story of Simonides of Ceos, a poet credited with inventing the art of memory, is told and retold in both ancient and contemporary rhetorical treatises13—how he narrowly escaped death when a palace collapsed killing all revelers at a banquet he attended; how he then discovered “the principles of the art of memory” by establishing the identity of each disfigured corpse based solely on his recollection of where the banqueters were seated.14 While the accent of each retelling rests primarily on the discovery of memory as a trained capacity, the ever-present exigence for Simonides’ epiphany is always grief-struck mourners combing through rubble in search of disarticulated remains.

The Simonides story sets the tone for subsequent scholarly engagement with memory.

Much of the work conducted under the interdisciplinary banner of memory studies starts with the problem of (re)collecting the dead—a theme explored in greater detail in chapters one and two of this study. The post-World War II uptake of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ work, which presents memory as a social rather than individual phenomenon operating in service of the present, bears this out.15 Collective trauma all but necessitates public reflection, usually in the form of ritualized commemoration—a subject examined in chapters three and four of this study. Collective traumas have consistently cued memory studies scholars to consider the ways that memories are publicly identified, animated, and enacted.16

Rhetoricians, too, have found fertile ground in the study of public memory.

That public memory is fundamentally rhetorical is, by now, a commonplace for rhetoricians.17 However, as many scholars argue, broad disciplinary consensus demands scrutiny of the specific nature of the relationship between rhetoric and memory.18 One point that is regularly raised without being fully explained is that memories frequently stay hidden only to emerge in unexpected ways.19 As Pierre Nora puts it in an oft-quoted passage from

“Between Memory and History,” memory “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”20 Going back to Halbwachs’ insistence that memory works for the present, scholars have regularly struck upon the opportunistic return of memory from sustained absences. On this point, Barbie Zelizer explains, memory itself “thrives on remaking the residue of past decades into material with contemporary resonance.”21 To be sure, the periodic resurgence in popularity of bygone events, figures, and places is not a new

7 object of study for rhetoricians. Stephen H. Browne’s “Remembering Crispus Attucks,”

Poirot and Watson’s “Memories of Freedom and White Resilience,” and Laura Michael

Brown’s “Remembering Silence” are but a few examples of scholarship that deftly examine public memories that disintegrate over time and are continually supplanted by processes of commemoration, while occasionally coalescing around newly formed ends.22 But why do some memories crop up at unexpected times? What happens when memories are adopted by the very institutions that disavowed and suppressed them in the past? How can scholars in rhetorical studies help explain the opportunistic resurgence of public memories or the deliberate dismissal of traumatic pasts?

In order to answer these questions, this study builds from and draws together extensive interdisciplinary conversations in history, geography, sociology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and rhetoric studies to analyze public memorial practices in New

Orleans. More specifically, the case studies in each chapter provide opportunities to explore how New Orleans’ funerary rituals—from jazz funerals to cenotaphic memorials—are used for commemorative purposes other than mourning and burying the dead. As each chapter makes clear, commemorative rituals and architecture serve different memorial functions, sometimes reanimating forgotten memories and at other times transitioning communities beyond painful memories. In order to better understand the rhetorical nature of New Orleans’ funerary traditions, old and emergent, I have devised a methodological approach that requires elaboration.

Rhetorical Field Methods

The mixed methods approach adopted in this study is primarily grounded in the growing literature of rhetorical field methods.23 While a variety of qualitative methods—e.g.,

8 fieldwork, participant observation, ethnographic interviews, performance, journaling, autoethnography, surveys, focus groups, etc.—can fall under the purview of rhetorical field methods, the methodological impulse that unifies these disparate approaches is a commitment to enriching the detail of criticism by engaging in situ rhetorical production. As

Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres explain in their essay

“Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods”:

Rhetorical field methods, we argue, refers both to the rhetorical intervention into

rhetorical spaces and action in which we engage when we describe and interpret

insights gained through in situ rhetorical study (like CR [critical rhetoric] this

descriptive and interpretive practice aims to contribute to emancipatory practice), and

to rhetorical field methods focus on the processual forms of rhetorical action that are

accessible only through participatory methods (and that are flattened when those

forms of rhetorical action are reduced to exclusively textual representations).24

Given my study’s focus on funerary rituals as public expressions of memory in New Orleans, rhetorical field methods provide a flexible framework for analyzing the rhetorical usefulness of commemorative architecture and traditions. My turn to rhetorical field methods is spurred by three primary motives. First, as is readily acknowledged by scholars studying space/place and public memory, “being there” matters. Second, rhetoric that unfolds in fleeting moments and cannot be reconstructed after the fact because of a dearth of documentation requires in- time critical observation. Finally, rhetorical field methods provide room for rhetorical critics to interrogate systems of oppression along with the communities that advocate directly for social change. This section will conclude with a brief description of the specific methods employed in this study.

“Being There”

While rhetorical field methods constitute a fairly recent scholarly development, rhetoric scholars writing about sites and rituals of public memory have consistently emphasized the importance of “being there.”25 Advocating for a thicker kind of critical engagement with rhetorical artifacts, one that takes into account the sensuous presence of bodies, Carole Blair asks rhetorical critics, “What do we ourselves lose of an experience by not being present? And what difference does that loss make?”26 As Phaedra C. Pezzullo makes clear in her book Toxic Tourism, critical presence, as a method of scholarship and mode of advocacy, offers a great deal to rhetoric studies.

More than simply “showing up,” being present as a mode of advocacy suggests that

the materiality of a place promises the opportunity to shape perceptions, bodies, and

lives with respect to the people and places hosting the experience. Being “present,”

like roll call in school, indicates the significance of someone literally coexisting with

another in a particular space and time. Yet, a rhetorical appreciation of “presence”

also can indicate when we feel as if someone, someplace, or something matters,

whether or not she/he/it is physically present with us.27

Here Pezzullo presents presence as a critical stance, one where scholars actively embrace their own embeddedness in the networks of community and discourse that they study. Such a stance recognizes that the labor of rhetorical criticism requires an openness to change that is enabled—though not exclusively—by being there.

The imperative of “being there” tends to push critics into “the field,” a theoretically ambiguous place rife with ethical and methodological implications for scholars conducting fieldwork. In their recent edited collection, Text + Field, Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen,

Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard define “the field as the nexus where rhetoric is produced, where it is enacted, where it circulates, and, consequently, where it is audienced.”28 Far from suggesting that all rhetoricians must take up fieldwork,29 the editors of Text + Field write that the field

[I]nvites rhetoricians to attend to the way discourse moves, articulates, and shapes

the material realities of people’s lives in the everyday, in the public, and in their

communities. It also allows scholars to attend to the often-unseen ways that

individuals and groups respond, resist, and try to revise these instantiations.30

Such an approach to rhetoric is useful given the cases examined in this study. Divided into two groups, the chapters focus on how funerary rituals and architecture are used, on the one hand, to make absences present, and on the other, to move beyond traumatic memories. More specifically, chapters one and two examine communal efforts to revive nearly-lost memories through a mock jazz funeral and a cenotaphic memorial respectively. Chapters three and four examine how communal memories of trauma are reframed outside of the enduring present through New Orleanian brass band traditions. Further, the bodily forms of jazz funeral processions and second line parades, as well as the sheer materiality of cenotaphic memorials makes rhetorical field methods a useful approach for engaging the many ways that memory is publicly performed and built into the New Orleanian cityscape. Because I agree with Senda-

Cook, Middleton, and Endres’ observation that rhetoric “is created in places that ‘have a say’ about what type of meanings can be created,” it was important to spend time in New Orleans, visit the memorials discussed, participate in memorial events, interview other participants and organizers, and conduct archival research on the funerary traditions of New Orleans’ brass bands.31

Inaccessible Archives

As Pezzullo argues in the afterword of Text + Field,

When I conduct interviews, start writing notes on participant observation, or decide to

share autoethnographic accounts as part of my research, it usually is because either

there is no existing archive that can answer my research questions more compellingly

or it is a result of the fact that my body was ‘in the field’ prior to writing and

discovered new research questions worth bringing back to the field of rhetoric.32

I was not in precisely the same position that Pezzullo describes above when I started writing about funerary traditions in New Orleans. Not only are there accessible scholarly conversations concerning New Orleans’ history, landscape, music, and monuments that I enthusiastically engage, there are also well-established archival resources that profoundly influenced my research.

For instance, the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University is a treasure-trove of information concerning brass band music and culture in New Orleans. In particular, the Donald Marquis Collection held in the Hogan Jazz Archive was an invaluable resource, forming the backbone of research in chapter one on Buddy Bolden’s 1996 mock jazz funeral. Additionally, holdings and archivists in the Hogan Jazz Archive helped me discover that mock funerals with music in New Orleans far pre-date the emergence of jazz. In fact, the earliest account I found was a short note in the Daily Picayune on June 29, 1841.

The Spaniards down town had a mock procession, or mock funeral, and music to

match, last evening. It was got up, we learn, at considerable expense, and in mockery

of a countryman of theirs, who has the misfortune to be an editor, and who said

something in his paper (the Phœnix, printed in the Spanish language) that they

conceived trod, editorially, on the kibes of their nationality.33

Based on these holdings, and supplemental research in newspaper databases, I pieced together an historical timeline of mock funerals with music in New Orleans that helped contextualize the rising popularity of commemorative jazz funerals after Hurricane Katrina.

The archive’s holdings, however, proved less useful for finding information about post-Katrina brass band traditions. After 2005, documentation of jazz funerals is scant despite increased local and national media exposure and the growing popularity of the tradition in New Orleans. The lack of documentation, of course, has a great deal to do with the limited resources that any archive has for collecting and cataloguing new material. Such resource constraints were undoubtedly compounded by the 2005 levee failures that flooded

Tulane’s campus and ruined some of the collections held in the Howard-Tilton Memorial

Library. Fortunately, for this study, the Hogan Jazz Archive is located on the second floor of

Jones Hall and was not flooded in 2005. However, while indispensable for establishing the historical context of a tradition, and introducing secondary literature on the topic, the archive still could not answer all of my research questions.

For instance, I wanted to find out why mock jazz funerals continue to be such a popular way of remembering or moving beyond a person, place, or event. While archival holdings and newspaper accounts might report that mock jazz funerals were held, they very rarely provided a rationale for their selection. Additionally, while jazz funerals are the subject of a great deal of scholarly literature, oral history projects with jazz musicians and enthusiasts, and photo documentation, hardly anything is written about mock funeral traditions that takes them seriously as local commemorative traditions in their own right.

That is, scholars writing about brass band traditions in New Orleans tend to characterize mock jazz funerals, if they acknowledge them at all, as mere appropriations of the neighborhood-based traditions of local black communities. For these reasons, I turn to rhetorical field methods to facilitate critical inquiry.

Because this study focuses on commemorations that took place between 1996 and

2017, I was able to speak with people who organized several of the events and memorials.

This was the case with chapters one and two. Furthermore, the two cases explored in chapters three and four are events that took place in New Orleans while I conducted preliminary dissertation research. My participation in the “Jazz Funeral for Katrina” and “Second Line to

Bury White Supremacy” gave me access to texts that would not have been available otherwise. Snippets of speeches, online news coverage, and scant photo and video documentation can be found of both events. However, my participation allowed me to use these textual fragments in a supplementary rather than primary role. I collected audio recordings from both events, took extensive fieldnotes and photos before, during, and after both processions, and, in the case of the Jazz Funeral for Katrina, I interviewed organizers and participants in the event. More than allowing me to amass a detailed collection of documents, my presence allowed me to both witness as an observer and critically engage as a participant the intermingling of multimodal discourses as they weaved together with bodily movements and memorial spaces.34 Being there, quite simply, provided access to deeply textured rhetorical events that are otherwise largely inaccessible.35

Participation and Social Justice in New Orleans

A final reason for taking up rhetorical field methods in this study is a general commitment to engaging the rhetorical underpinnings of power, privilege, and

14 marginalization through critical participation. As Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres argue in “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods,” “These efforts at in situ rhetorical analysis are valuable because they sharpen the ability for CR [critical rhetoric] to engage seriously the voices of marginalized rhetorical communities and mundane discourses that often evade critical attention.”36 This lack of attention—as scholars in feminist studies, critical race studies, queer studies, and Latinx studies have long acknowledged—reinforces extant power differentials by privileging the voices of dominant communities and excluding others. These exclusions have profound effects, especially when they are replicated by silences in scholarly conversations. And, as Laura Michael Brown argues, “silences shape the contours of public memory.”37

In the afterword of Text + Field, Pezzullo warns that if scholars of rhetoric focus exclusively on documentation that already exists, real harm will be done to the discipline:

[I]f we reduce rhetorical studies to analyzing existing records, we risk radically

narrowing the relevance of our field by ignoring many practices of everyday life, as

well as agents and acts that are not yet widely accepted, known, or deemed legal. It

also cuts the field off from a richer exploration of generative topoi that can be

discovered through politics of embodied proxemics and intersubjectivity.38

Rhetorical field methods, then, open one avenue for engaging a variety of social ills including systemic racism, environmental justice, economic inequality, gentrification and spatial segregation, over-policing, inadequate public schooling, to name just a few, as they are manifest in the voices and experiences of New Orleanians rallying for social justice through commemoration.

Furthermore, critical practice is itself rhetorical. As Pezzullo points out, “Our bodies as rhetoricians in the world were and are constitutive of our rhetorical practices and theories, as well as our possibilities and our restrictions.”39 For instance, in my audio recordings of the

Second Line to Bury White Supremacy, my voice is loudly audible chatting with other second liners, answering interview questions from a freelance reporter, shouting chants, asking for sunscreen, singing along with familiar brass band songs, recording notes about the second line route, thanking Take ’Em Down NOLA leaders, and nervously asking police officers if white demonstrators in Lee Circle had weapons. Undoubtedly, my participatory presence changed, however slightly, the nature of the event, and it certainly enriched my perspective as a scholar. Rhetorical field methods equipped me to participate in this and other local commemorative traditions as a scholar acting in solidarity with activist causes.

Research Methods

I started this project by delving into the holdings of the Hogan Jazz Archive. From this experience, I identified New Orleanians whom I should talk with if I wanted a more complete understanding of the ways funerary rituals are used for purposes other than burying the dead in New Orleans.40 After obtaining exempt status from PSU’s IRB, I made arrangements to interview event organizers, participants, jazz practitioners, and academic experts. Those who agreed to an interview signed an informed consent form explaining the nature of the study and that participation was completely voluntary. I shared a digital copy of the form with interviewees in advance of the interview along with a hard copy immediately prior to the interview. I conducted all interviews face-to-face except one conversation over

Skype, and another on the phone. I recorded audio from all interviews and took notes during each conversation. I conducted the interviews between January 25, 2017 and February 7,

2017 during a research trip to New Orleans. Upon returning to State College, Pennsylvania, I transcribed the interviews. After completing the transcription process, I conducted member checking. I gave interviewees time to check their transcripts against the audio recording, make edits, and ask for additions or deletions from the finished transcript. The edited transcripts took the place of the initial transcripts in this study’s analysis. I interviewed 22 people for this study and I included ten of the most relevant interviews in this dissertation.

In addition to archival research and ethnographic interviews, I also engaged in participant observation for Dillard University’s “Jazz Funeral: Burying the Past” examined in chapter three and Take ’Em Down NOLA’s “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy” examined in chapter four. In both instances, I took copious notes about the route of the procession, who participated, my observations about the procession, and how much the procession conformed to my understanding of New Orleans’ parading traditions. These observations were written first by hand, then compiled in a Word document later on the same day. Further, I visited the location of the processions at separate occasions and recorded my reflections and observations in a journal. Additionally, I combed through social media accounts and local newspapers in order to find coverage of the commemorative parades.

These media accounts rounded out my perspective as a participant.

The mixed methods approach of this study yielded a variety of texts. Following my disciplinary training in textual criticism, the writing process involved blending diverse texts into a coherent argumentative narrative. Occasionally, sources contradicted each other. The contradiction almost always proved immaterial to the argument of this study and were therefore omitted. However, when the contradiction had a direct bearing on the argument, I resolved it by asking for clarification if the source was someone interviewed. If this did not

17 resolve the contradiction, I privileged the perspective with the most supporting evidence. On one occasion, an interviewee asked that I not share their observations on a certain topic with another interviewee. I honored those wishes and did not include the segment of the interview in question, despite its insight and relevance to the argument of the study. Throughout, I privileged the voices of New Orleanians in the hopes of providing a platform for underrepresented perspectives in scholarly conversations. A bit of personal history will help contextualize my scholarly orientation in this study.

Writing About New Orleans

I fell in love with New Orleans as an undergraduate when I traveled to the Crescent

City on a short-term rebuilding trip with a group of college friends in 2007. Before this trip, I traveled to historic cities, but New Orleans was unlike any place I had ever been. In New

Orleans, I felt like I was a part of history. Of course, the feeling of stepping back in time is intentionally cultivated by the city’s tourist boosters through architecture, landscapes, music, food, literature, art, and public transportation, among other things.41 Learning about the artful curation of New Orleans’ past, however, didn’t make the feeling any less real.

Over the course of my undergraduate career, I went back to New Orleans on two more rebuilding trips, one of which I organized. After completing my B.A. at a small liberal arts college in southwest Missouri, I moved to New Orleans to begin an 11-month appointment as a NOLA Service Corps Fellow with the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana’s

Rebuild Program. My job was to lead volunteer crews as we rebuilt houses five years after

Hurricane Katrina. The experience was not only an education in construction, but also an ongoing lesson in developing cultural competencies that continue to influence my scholarship and pedagogy.

The volunteers that I worked with were, like me, largely middle class, of European-

American descent, and mostly hailed from suburban communities across the South and the

Midwest. The homeowners, whose houses we worked on, by contrast, were mostly African

Americans who had lived in New Orleans for most of their lives. As a crew chief, my job was to ensure that volunteers had the equipment and instruction they needed to complete their work efficiently and safely. My job was also to answer volunteer questions about homeowner’s lives, Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans.

Regularly, volunteers familiar with Habitat for Humanity’s “sweat equity” policy— where homeowners are required to participate in the labor of building their own houses— expressed surprise that our organization did not have a similar policy. After all, these volunteers reasoned, homeowners should have an invested stake in their house. These inquiries often came from a genuine place of curiosity built out of their own cultural understanding of fairness. After all, volunteers gave up their time, money, and energy to help rebuild a complete stranger’s house. However, the repeated, if indirect, insistence that homeowners should pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, as it were, failed to grasp the myriad reasons why such a demand was far from fair.

New Orleans’ history of segregation and gentrification, for instance, meant that the houses we worked on were in predominately black neighborhoods with lower property values than neighborhoods with predominately white residents. Because the Road Home program allocated financial aid to homeowners based on property values instead of the estimated cost of restoring flood damaged homes, residents living in black neighborhoods consistently received substantially less money than they needed to rebuild. This was why several homeowners still lived in FEMA trailers five years after the floodwaters subsided. And this

19 doesn’t even begin to account for a host of other factors, including insurance and contractor fraud, the unnecessary demolition of public housing projects, and plans to convert historically black neighborhoods into “green space,” that conspired to keep black New

Orleanians from returning home. The unwillingness of volunteers to consider underlying structural reasons that Hurricane Katrina was a burden disproportionately shouldered by poor communities of color spoke to attitudes of superiority cloaked in benevolence that has characterized liberal whites “helping” black communities in America for centuries.

As a scholar, my research has roots in rebuilding homes in New Orleans, and I am certainly implicated in critiques of white male privilege and faith-based philanthropy.42 For instance, as a midwestern, cis-gender male of European-American descent, I have to wrestle with what it meant for me to live in a rental house that my roommates and I could not afford, but was provided for us for by the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. Located in the 7th Ward— an historically black area of the city—the house was an affordable rental unit occupied by non-New Orleanians at a time when affordable rental properties were scarce. My roommates and I would ask each other if our presence on St. Bernard Avenue was inadvertently preventing New Orleanians from returning home. While the question oversimplifies our situation, and does not account for the community service work we were doing, the answer, we came to realize, was at least partially yes. Unquestionably, our presence was symptomatic of gentrifying trends that continue to plague New Orleans. And our status as temporary volunteer laborers impeded our ability to get to know the community we were a part of in more than a superficial manner. As a brief illustration, it took a research trip back to New

Orleans six years after I left for me to discover in an interview that I used to live less than a block away from a veteran brass band musician and a handful of his bandmates.

Nevertheless, my experience rebuilding homes in New Orleans taught me the importance of listening to everyday stories and not presuming to know what communities need without hearing from those communities first. By listening to homeowners tell stories about life in New Orleans, I learned how intricate attachments to homes, neighborhoods, and communities could be felt in seemingly everyday connections with pieces of furniture, colors of paint, brass band music, familiar tastes of a home-cooked meal, and the smell of flowers blown by a humid breeze. These affective experiences of life in New Orleans can easily be overlooked by those new or unfamiliar with the city; and yet, they are crucial elements of public memory practices.

When it comes to memories of home and feelings of communal dislocation, music is a complex force for stitching together what might otherwise be lost. Reflecting on his experience returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, T.R. Johnson, an English professor at Tulane University and disc jockey for WWOZ—a listener-supported radio station dedicated to playing New Orleans music—described the importance of music for facilitating memory. “Historically, I suspect that whenever a group of people is forced to undergo an experience of profound displacement, that experience carries a craving for music as support, sustenance, perhaps a key to remembering, an essential element in the act of saying good-bye.”43 As Johnson goes on to explain, music creates a shared space, not just for musicians, but for everyone within sonic range of the tune. “To listen is to share in the emotional energies that propel the song,” writes Johnson, “to sing along even if only in silence, that is, under our breath.”44 Listeners, in other words, are not merely passive spectators, they can be co-participants in the crafting of community.45 This is especially the case at jazz funerals and second line parades, where the presence of mourning/celebrating

21 communities make the event meaningful.46 As a rhetorical critic writing about musical funerary traditions in New Orleans, listening—and dancing—with others opens up possibilities of articulating bodily memories of community together.47 Listening, therefore, became central to my methods, offering important insights into the rhetorical nature of commemorative traditions in New Orleans.

In this study, I listened for the importance of quotidian movements, locations, landmarks, sounds, smells, and feelings in my interviews and worked to incorporate more than just my eyes and ears in fieldnotes and journal accounts. In the end, both the methodological approaches and the cases engaged are selected to highlight discourses that are otherwise marginalized in academic conversations. In so doing, this study works to understand and unsettle naturalized norms of public memory that all too often privilege elites at the expense of everyone else. I examine what communities are included and excluded from public memory and how marginalized communities resist oppressive architectures of memory. By conducting rhetorical field work, ethnographic interviews, and member checking, New Orleanians participate in my work as valued interlocutors rather than interview subjects. As a whole, this study contributes to the broader goal of uncovering rhetorical characteristics that produce flexible traditions of memory, offering more diverse, inclusive, and adjustable means for representing the past and imagining the future.

Preview of Chapters

This dissertation is divided into four case studies, each highlighting different rhetorical components of public memory. Organized thematically, the first two chapters explore commemorations for the unacknowledged dead through the inscription of names in a process that I call cenotaphic naming—a concept that I define in chapter two. The final two

22 chapters examine the acknowledgement and the laying to rest of traumatic pasts through local brass band traditions that function as public languages of mourning and celebration. In each chapter, I adopt a mixed methods approach drawing on archival research, textual analysis, as well as ethnographic interviews and observation that enables a textured critical perspective on New Orleanian practices of memory.

The first chapter, “Burying the King Again: Buddy Bolden’s Jazz Funeral and

Defleshed Memory,” conducts a rhetorical analysis of the efforts to commemorate Charles

“Buddy” Bolden with a mock jazz funeral in 1996. Widely recognized as a jazz pioneer today, Bolden acquired most of his acclaim posthumously. Bolden spent the last 25 years of his life in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum where he died in obscurity in 1931. Bolden’s mock funeral, culminating in the dedication of a memorial cenotaph in Holt Cemetery, provides a useful case for extending public memory scholarship by exploring the rhetorical dimensions of defleshed memories. This chapter theorizes defleshed memories as memories whose physical trace—or evidence of a physical trace—is attenuated to a state close to non- existence by time or neglect. Further, this chapter finds that material and memorial fragments combine to re-embody and reanimate defleshed memories through rhetorical acts of commemoration.

The second chapter, “St. Anna’s Murder Board: Memorializing New Orleans’

Victims of Violence,” explores the rhetorical function of naming in ongoing commemorative practices. Frustrated by high homicide rates in post-Katrina New Orleans, Deacon Elaine

Clements and Fr. Bill Terry of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church attached a three-by-eight-foot tan coroplast board to the side of their church in 2007, with the dates of death, names, ages, and methods of death for every person murdered in the New Orleans metro area. For over a

23 decade, new names have been added by hand once a week in an act of public accounting designed to prevent New Orleanians from becoming “dangerously numb” to the effects of violence in their city.48 Drawing from news coverage, field observations, and interviews with staff at St. Anna’s, this chapter explores the rhetorical work that public inscription and display does in the midst of an ongoing crisis. Following Carole Blair’s observation that

“naming is not naming is not naming,” this chapter concludes that the Murder Board’s cenotaphic naming resists dehumanization and cultivates a welcoming sense of a broader, caring New Orleans community.49

The third chapter, “‘Burying the Past’: Dillard University’s Jazz Funeral for Katrina,” explores how public commemorations help communities move beyond collective trauma.

Since 2005, staged commemorative jazz funerals have been a recurrent ritual used by local communities and organizations to acknowledge the tragic loss of life and way of life in New

Orleans, while celebrating the joyful return of New Orleans’ people and culture. In this chapter, I analyze Dillard University’s “Jazz Funeral: Burying the Past” held on August 28,

2015, just a day before the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf

Coast. Building from field notes taken as a participant in the jazz funeral as well as interviews conducted with organizers of the event, this chapter explores the way that jazz funeral tropes were combined with the campus’ most sacred landscape—the Avenue of the

Oaks—to help Dillard University focus on gains made over the last decade while laying traumatic memories of Hurricane Katrina to rest.

The final chapter of the dissertation, “‘Second Line to Bury White Supremacy’: Take

’Em Down NOLA, Absent Monuments, and Residual Memories,” examines what happens when monumental histories are removed from places of public veneration. This chapter

24 explores how the residual memories of absent monuments can be used as rhetorical resources for diverse communities. Theorizing residual memory as the remaining rhetorical potency that clings to a commemorative site after the focal object or structure of memorialization is removed, this chapter examines the case of the Liberty Place Monument, the first Jim Crow- era monument removed in New Orleans in the summer of 2017. Further, Take ’Em Down

NOLA’s “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy” works as an activist commemorative event that mobilizes the residual memories of the absent obelisk toward ends that clash with white supremacist ideologies the Liberty Place Monument has publicly enshrined since 1891.

Taken together, the case studies examined in this project offer a fuller understanding of the rhetorical nature of funerary rituals in New Orleans. More particularly, each case demonstrates another way that funerary rituals and architecture can be used for purposes other than burying the dead and alleviating the grief of bereaved communities. That is, funerary traditions of New Orleans brass bands—as explored in chapter one, three, and four—and cenotaphic memorials in the city—as explored in chapter two—can be used by

New Orleanians to resuscitate nearly-lost memories and move beyond memories of trauma.

By listening to the living, as well as the dead, the cases in this study offer theoretical insights into the ways that memories are discovered, animated, elided, and sustained by caring communities through commemorative action.

1 “How Tall is the Statue of Robert E. Lee?,” WGNO (New Orleans, LA), May 19,

2017, accessed August 23, 2017, http://wgno.com/2017/05/19/how-tall-is-the-statue-of- robert-e-lee/.

2 “Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee Statue Removed in New Orleans,” Times-

Picayune (New Orleans, LA), May 19, 2017, updated May 20, 2017, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/live_updates_confederate_gen_r.html.

3 Beauregard’s statue is “estimated to weigh between 12,000 and 14,000 pounds,” according to the Times-Picayune. “Confederate Monuments: Crews Remove P.G.T.

Beauregard Statue,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), May 16, 2017, updated May 17,

2017, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/pgt_beauregard_statue_coming_d.html.

4 YouTube video footage of Da Truth Brass Band arriving at the statue of Beauregard is embedded in the Times-Picayune’s timeline for the statue removal. “Confederate

Monuments.”

5 WWL-TV reporter Danny Moteverde tweeted a 29 second video of a brass band playing “Ho-Na-Nae” beside the statue of Beauregard at 11:32 pm on May 16, 2017. The video ends with the band incorporating Joe Avery’s riff into the song. https://twitter.com/DCMonteverde/status/864730421673824256.

6 Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2013), 15.

7 Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New

Orleans Music Since World War II (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press,

2009), 273.

8 Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New

Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 4 (1999): 472-504; Helen A.

Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” American

Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 754; Sakakeeny, Roll With It, 33-34; Joel Dinerstein, “Second

Lining Post-Katrina: Learning Community from the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure

Club,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 624; and Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “‘They’re

Tryin’ to Wash Us Away,’: New Orleans Musicians Surviving Katrina,” Journal of American

History 94, no. 3 (2007): 813.

9 Screenshot of original tweet captured by author. @ClintSmithIII, Twitter, May 17,

2017, 8:49 a.m.

10 “Confederate Monuments.”

11 Screenshot of original tweet captured by author. @The_Gambit, Twitter, May 17,

2017, 2:31 a.m.

12 Jazz band episode is from notes taken during the Times-Picayune live-streaming coverage of Lee’s removal. “Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”

13 Cicero, De oratore, in Cicero De Oratore: Books I & II, translated by E.W. Sutton and H Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 2.86; Quintilian, The

Orators Education [Institutio oratoria], translated by Donald A Russell (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2001), XI.ii.11-17; Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London:

Bodley Head, 2014), 17-19; Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction:

Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and

Memorials ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 2010), 1.

14 Yates, 17.

15 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory translated by Lewis A. Coser

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37-40.

16 For more on the relationship between collective memory and trauma see, Mieke

Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present

(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999); David W. Blight, Race and

Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001); Drew

Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York:

Vintage Civil War Library, 2008); Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s

Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Edward

Tabor, Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1993); and James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

17 Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the

Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no 2 (1999): 169; Blair,

Dickinson, and Ott, 5-12; Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering ‘A Great Fag’: Visualizing

Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4

(2011): 439; Kendall R. Phillips, Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 2004), 2-4; Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes, Global

Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 2011), 1-2; G. Mitchell Reyes, Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity

(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 4; and Bradford Vivian, Public

Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park: Pennsylvania

State University Press, 2010), 12-13.

18 Stephen H. Browne, “Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,”

Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 2 (1995): 237; Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, 12-22; and

Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public

Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 209.

19 Phillips, “The Failure of Memory,” 216.

20 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,”

Representations 26 (1989): 8.

21 Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory

Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 2 (1995): 217.

22 Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks”; Kristan Poirot and Shevaun

E. Watson, “Memories of Freedom and White Resilience: Place, Tourism, and Urban

Slavery,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2015); and Laura Michael Brown,

“Remembering Silence: Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins,”

Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2018).

23 For two edited collections that provide numerous examples of how rhetoric scholars can turn toward the field see, Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park:

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); and Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess,

Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook, Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ (London: Lexington Books,

2015).

24 Emphasis in original text. Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and

Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western

Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 387.

25 Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,”

Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 274-76. See also Greg Dickinson and

Giorgia Aiello, “Being Through There Matters: Materiality, Bodies, and Movement in Urban

Communication Research,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 1295;

Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres, 395; Roberta Chevrette, “Holographic Rhetoric:

De/Colonizing Public Memory at Pueblo Grande,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical

Method ed. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard

(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 151; and Sara L.

McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard, “Introduction:

Articulating Text and Field in the Nodes of Rhetorical Scholarship,” in Text + Field:

Innovations in Rhetorical Method ed. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016),

26 Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 276.

27 Emphasis in original text. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of

Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

2007), 9.

28 Emphasis in original text. McKinnon, Asen, Chávez, and Howard, “Introduction,”

29 McKinnon, Asen, Chávez, and Howard, “Introduction,” 5.

30 McKinnon, Asen, Chávez, and Howard, “Introduction,” 4.

31 Samantha Senda-Cook, Michael K. Middleton, and Danielle Endres, “Interrogating the ‘Field,’” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method ed. Sara L. McKinnon,

Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: The

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 26.

32 Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Afterword: Decentralizing and Regenerating the Field,” in

Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method ed. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma

R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University

Press, 2016), 184.

33 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “to gall or tread on (one’s) kibes” means “to press upon closely so as to irritate or annoy, to hurt one’s feelings.” A variation of the phrase appears in Hamlet v. i. 137. “[Spaniards; Procession; Funeral; Music;

Match; Considerable; Expense; Editor],” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 29, 1841, p. 2, c. 1.

34 “If what is at stake is capturing the affective, embodied, temporal, and polyvocal dimensions of rhetorical discourse, then we need to learn how to engage in the intertwined practices of observation, creative nonfiction writing, and self-reflection.” Alina Haliliuc,

“Being, Evoking, and Reflecting from the Field: A Case for Critical Ethnography in

Audience-Centered Rhetorical Criticism,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method ed. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard

(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 137.

35 Assembling textual material that is inaccessible without venturing into the field because of marginalization or underrepresentation is a regular justification for rhetorical fieldwork. For example, see McKinnon, Asen, Chávez, and Howard, “Introduction,” 6;

Whitney Gent, “When Homelessness Becomes a ‘Luxury’: Neutrality as an Obstacle to

Counterpublic Rights Claims,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 235;

Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres, 387, 389.

36 Middleton, Senda-Cook, and Endres, 387.

37 Brown, 51.

38 Pezzullo, “Afterword,” 184.

39 Pezzullo, “Afterword,” 179. See also, Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial

Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies ed. Jack Selzer and

Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 30-34.

40 Before conducting interviews, I worked with the Institutional Review Board at

Penn State, University Park to ensure that my research plan was properly organized and ethically sound. After a few months of developing research protocols, drafting sample interview questions, and designing informed consent forms, my project received the IRB designation of “exempt.”

41 For more on the relationship between history, memory, and tourism in New

Orleans see, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archaeology (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2016); Kevin Fox Gotham, Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and

Race in the Big Easy (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Lynnell L.

Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

42 For more on the complexity of philanthropic and faith-based recovery work in post-

Katrina New Orleans see, Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New

Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

43 T.R. Johnson, “Ghost Music: Silence and Listening in the Post-Katrina Ninth

Ward,” Minnesota Review 84 (2015): 106.

44 Johnson, 108.

45 Gregory Clark, Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of

Getting Along (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 59.

46 Critiquing New Orleans politicians who hire brass bands for second line parades to bolster their appeal with New Orleans’ black communities, anthropologist Helen A. Regis writes that “A second line with no second liners is nothing more than a staged minstrel pageant.” Regis, “Second Lines,” 496.

47 For more on listening as a critical rhetorical practice see, Krista Ratcliffe,

Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University Press, 2005); and Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe, Silence and Listening as

Rhetorical Arts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

48 Interview with Deacon Elaine Clements, January 31, 2017.

49 Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 282.

CHAPTER ONE

Burying the King Again:

Buddy Bolden’s Jazz Funeral and Defleshed Memory

If you walk along the shell-graveled paths of Holt Cemetery in New Orleans,

Louisiana, you will find disorderly rows of rectangular burial plots bounded by cement blocks, 2 x 6 wooden beams, and, in some cases, PVC pipes. The ornamentation of headstones varies widely, but none can match the regal grandeur of the sepulchral vaults of neighboring cemeteries like Cypress Grove, Saint Patrick, Greenwood, Lake Lawn Metairie, and St. Louis No. 3. A tall live oak garlanded with Spanish moss, home to a few boisterous crows, is perhaps the most visually arresting feature of Holt’s landscape. Visitors probably do not need the plaque beside the iron entry gates to tell them that Holt is not like New

Orleans’ other more famous “cities of the dead.” Holt’s relative lack of upkeep, modest memorial architecture, and persistent practice of underground burials distinguish this cemetery from those frequented by tourists. “Originally a cemetery for the city’s indigent population,” the entry plaque reads, “Holt Cemetery was first mentioned in city records in

1879, most likely named for Joseph Holt, a physician from Charity Hospital.” Joseph Holt made a name for himself as an advocate for the efficient disposal of human excrement and municipal garbage.1 During the yellow fever epidemic in 1878, Holt, who later became president of the New Orleans Sewerage Company, castigated city officials for allowing the burial of human remains mere inches below ground, reporting complaints that the air was

“heavy with the exhalations of the dead.”2 Given New Orleans’ reputation as the “birthplace of jazz” it seems odd that Holt Cemetery—whose namesake’s legacy is roughly synonymous

34 with waste disposal—is the final resting place for Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the first “King of

Jazz.”

When a person credited with jumpstarting a major cultural tradition dies, official records, correspondences, published works, interviews, pictures, and recordings often form the body of public memory for the deceased. Commemorative services and memorial architecture, or at the very least a gravestone, typically serve as physical testaments to a life worth remembering. But hardly any of these memorial practices happened immediately following Bolden’s death. In fact, what complicates Buddy Bolden’s case—and makes it all the more interesting for scholars of rhetoric and memory—is the dearth of historical data on the jazzman. Most striking is the loss of Bolden’s body. With Bolden’s cornet silenced by institutionalization and then death, and his remains placed in an unmarked grave, the memory of “King Bolden” left scarcely a trace in New Orleans. All that changed in 1996, when the

Buddy Bolden Planning Committee (BBPC) formed as a group committed to publicly commemorating Buddy Bolden. On the jazz musician’s 119th birthday, the BBPC borrowed a local burial tradition–the jazz funeral—to honor Bolden. Crowds of jazz fans, musicians, city officials, students, and curious onlookers followed the Olympia Brass Band through Holt

Cemetery, giving Bolden the musical funeral he never had. After the dirges ceased and dignitaries finished their speeches, a granite cenotaph was unveiled near the spot where

Bolden was originally buried.

This chapter conducts a rhetorical analysis of the efforts to rebody and reanimate the memory of Buddy Bolden with a jazz funeral. Bolden’s 1996 mock funeral provides a helpful case for exploring the ways that absence is countered when all-but-forgotten memories are gathered, rebodied, and reintroduced as sturdy parts of broader public

35 memories. Further, this chapter examines how the forced atrophy of memory—theorized below as “defleshed memory”—sanitizes public figures, such as Buddy Bolden, depoliticizing their memory. In order to present a theory of defleshed memory, this chapter proceeds in five parts. First, I define and theorize the concept of defleshed memory as an analytic device useful for scholars of memory and rhetoric. Second, I discuss Bolden’s silencing and memorial decomposition. Third, I explore how jazz funerals function as participatory languages of mourning and celebration that add to scholarly conversations concerning the relationship between jazz and democracy. Fourth, I analyze the Buddy Bolden

Planning Committee’s efforts to use Bolden’s defleshed memory as an advertisement.

Finally, I discuss a short documentary about the 1996 mock funeral and the role that living commemorative traditions play in rebodying defleshed memories.

Defleshed Memory

The latter half of Buddy Bolden’s life is a firm reminder that even the most sonorous black voices can be muted by structures of oppression. The innovative cornet player became a local celebrity in New Orleans because of his sheer volume and his band’s ability to play the blues in a danceable tempo, twin musical innovations that sowed the early seeds of jazz.3

In April 1907, just after Bolden’s popularity peaked in New Orleans and five months before his thirtieth birthday, a commitment order issued by Judge T. W. C. Ellis sent Bolden to the

State Insane Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana on the grounds of insanity brought on by alcohol.4

Judge Ellis’ order came after a violent episode involving Bolden’s mother-in-law in March

1906 and Bolden’s physical collapse during a Labor Day Parade later that year.5 Bolden spent the last 25 years of his life as a ward of the state, dying on November 4, 1931. Geddes-

Moss Undertaking and Embalming Co. of New Orleans received Bolden’s body and oversaw

36 his burial in Holt Cemetery following a daylong wake that attracted a few cousins and close family friends. Donald M. Marquis, who published the most comprehensive biography of

Bolden, notes that Bolden received none of the celebratory attention that most famous musicians in New Orleans garner at their death; writing, “[I]t is doubtful that many

[musicians] were aware of Buddy’s death. There was no brass band to say farewell, nor even a former sideman to act as pallbearer or to ‘walk the final mile’ with the ‘king.’”6 Buried without a gravestone, the unmarked decomposition of Bolden’s body usefully illustrates the process I theorize below as defleshed memory.

Archaeologist Ryan Gray, who studies Holt Cemetery, used the term “defleshed” while talking with me about Louisiana state regulations for archaeological digs expected to uncover human remains. When bodies are buried, decomposition commences; muscles and sinews slowly disarticulate from bone leaving “defleshed” remains. Nineteenth-century New

Orleanians feared “deathly exhalations” and harmful “effluvia” that were said to emanate from decomposing bodies.7 These concerns prompted the city to pass ordinances regulating how long bodies must remain interred before they can be safely disinterred. According to

Gray, once remains are thoroughly defleshed they rarely pose a threat to public health. In much the same way that literal bodies deflesh over time, memories also atrophy. Of course, both processes of decomposition can be arrested, through embalming and acts of memorialization, for instance. However, when bodies and memories stop moving, both disintegrate.8

In this chapter, I use the corporeal metaphor of “defleshed memory” to describe memories whose physical trace—or evidence of a physical trace—is attenuated to a state close to non-existence by coercive acts of institutional repression and neglect. Though it is

37 natural for bodies and memories to decay over time, the concept of defleshed memories, as theorized in this essay, refers to the accelerated process of decomposition conducted for the sake of sanitizing otherwise radical memories. Put in other words, defleshed memories are deliberately consigned to the past in ways that encourage rapid deterioration until memories can be “safely” exhumed and incorporated into institutionalized versions of public memory.

Defleshed memories characteristically do not exist within the realm of living memory, do not leave robust or reliable documentation in their own time, and were not subjects of memorialization from contemporaries; in fact, memorialization is regularly suppressed.

Defleshed memories, therefore, persist largely through reconstructive efforts of committed communities or individuals who reconstitute fragmented pasts after subversive details are lost to time. Unlike recollected living memories, or monuments whose sheer materiality preserves their “recalcitrant ‘presentness,’” defleshed memories are first recovered and inventively reconstructed by those who did not experience them.9 Without intervention, which usually includes institutional endorsement, defleshed memories tenuously cling to the margins even as they recede ever closer to oblivion. As such, defleshed memories provide rhetoric scholars with an opportunity to more carefully consider how public memories can be stripped of their political potency by institutional neglect before being dredged up for contemporary use.

As the introduction to this study established, public memory is fundamentally rhetorical in its construction, maintenance, and dissemination.10 Furthermore, as the mythic image of Simonides of Ceos combing through rubble suggests, the systematic study of memory is regularly attached to quests for human remains. That is, as scholars studying public memory have long recognized, individual deaths and collective traumas invite

38 memorial action from surviving communities.11 In the event that adequate facts are difficult to find, as is the case with defleshed memories, commemorative action must take place to rebody and reanimate nearly lost memories. This chapter investigates the rhetorical work of reincorporating defleshed memories into broader public memories. In so doing, this chapter offers theoretical insights into how, in Pierre Nora’s words, “long dormant” memories are

“periodically revived.”12 Therefore, this chapter offers defleshed memory as a starting point for theorizing the role institutions play in suppressing and reviving memories of public figures. I argue that defleshed memory illuminates a process of forgetting whereby the resistant political potential of memories is forced to deteriorate over time until skeletal remains can be resurrected in service of depoliticized contemporary needs. Attention to defleshed memories, then, demystifies the reappearance of all-but-lost memories by focusing on what purposes reanimated memories are forced to serve in the present. Further, defleshed memories raise the question of whether reanimated memories can ever fully be sanitized of their radical potential. The case of Buddy Bolden proves an exemplary illustration.

Muting Buddy Bolden

Holt Cemetery contains roughly 50,000 mortal remains in approximately 4,000 burial plots.13 In our conversation about Holt Cemetery, Gray explained that this overcrowding is made possible by Holt’s unofficial policy which stipulates that plots can be reused following ten years of neglect. In a cemetery as poorly organized as Holt, it is hard to tell which plots are well-tended and which ones ignored. Friends and families of the deceased at Holt commonly fear that their loved-ones will be exhumed or dug-through without warning.14

Such was the fate of Buddy Bolden. Marquis was unable to locate the musician’s final resting place during his biographical research, discovering from interviews with one of Holt’s

39 caretakers that Bolden was originally buried somewhere in plot C, a section of the cemetery

“about the size of a quarter of a city block.”15 Since the initial burial, Bolden’s body was removed and buried elsewhere on the grounds.16 Gray told me “with 98% certainty” that

Bolden’s remains will never be found.17

Compounding the loss of Bolden’s body is the scant documentation of his life. There are no extant musical recordings of the legendary Buddy Bolden Brass Band; Bolden left behind no personal papers, interviews, or written musical compositions; and the only newspaper coverage of Bolden during his lifetime made no mention of his musical career, chronicling instead his multiple arrests. One photograph taken in 1905 of Bolden and his band survives, but far from illuminating his past, the photo is shrouded in scholarly controversy.18 In the image, a partially out-of-focus Bolden stands in the back wearing a black coat and white shirt. He smiles slightly, holding up a cornet on his open palm. Aside from the picture and newspaper reports, most of what we know about Bolden was gathered posthumously by jazz enthusiasts collecting oral histories from New Orleans musicians who stood to gain professionally by exaggerating their association with Bolden and the natal strains of jazz.19 What remains of Buddy Bolden’s suppressed musical legacy is skeletal: a defleshed memory.

In the mid-1930s, a few years after Bolden’s death, the first wave of jazz historians devoted themselves to finding the origins of jazz. Following tips from Louis Armstrong, these scholars discovered that Bolden was widely credited by New Orleans musicians with shaping a characteristic style that launched the burgeoning musical form.20 They quickly began searching for a wax cylinder Bolden allegedly cut with his band in the mid-1890s.21

Unfortunately, the recording was never found, leading some to conclude that the “Holy Grail

40 of jazz history”22 was either destroyed23 or made unplayable by more than a century of exposure to New Orleans’ severe humidity.24 Compounding the problem, the recordings of

Bolden’s contemporaries—Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, Joe “King” Oliver, and Louis

Armstrong—are at best loose approximations of what Bolden might have sounded like had his career extended beyond 1906.25

For some, Bolden’s defleshed memory obscures the early history of jazz with a productively ambiguous silence. Cultural studies scholar Krin Gabbard puts a positive spin on the situation, writing, “We have only the faintest idea of how popular music in New

Orleans sounded before 1920. And even if that wax cylinder did turn up somehow, someday, jazz aficionados would probably be disappointed. The music would sound hopelessly archaic.”26 Lending credence to Gabbard’s perspective is the testimony of Willie Cornish, who played valve trombone on the Bolden recording. According to Cornish, the band committed “a march rather than a blues or stomp” to the wax cylinder.27 Despite all this, the

Buddy Bolden Brass Band left an oversized impression on the history of jazz, an impression accented by an abundance of oral histories and a lack of sonic evidence. Bolden’s “loudly absent” cornet28 forced those straining to hear the “ghost sounds”29 that emanated from New

Orleans’ past to find it not imprinted in wax, but instead in the stories that circulated around

Bolden. Silence from official documents and public commemorations compelled those listening for echoes of Bolden’s cornet in the first- and second-hand testimony of New

Orleans’ musicians to imaginatively sound out their own history of jazz’s early days.

Simply put, Bolden’s legacy as the “First King of Jazz” did not emerge organically from his music; rather, the rhetorical work of recollecting Bolden’s defleshed memory was spurred by scholars and jazz enthusiasts who never heard Bolden play. This process of

41 reanimating defleshed memories is explicitly rhetorical. In fact, Buddy Bolden’s defleshed memories are akin to the “scraps and pieces of evidence” that Michael Calvin McGee described as the building materials that audiences and critics use to fashion “apparently finished discourse.”30 As with fragmented texts, the skeletal remains of defleshed memories—like Buddy Bolden’s—tend to be diffuse, scattered, and hidden. The work of assembly is a rhetorical endeavor that falls to individuals and communities committed to vivifying nearly absent memories for broader public audiences. It is through the inventive acts of discovery and arrangement that such communities select disparate memories, articulating them together in ways that endow the resulting formations with symbolic significance as the representatives of a past no longer present.31 Ethnomusicologist Matt

Sakakeeny corroborates this point, writing that “Bolden’s mythical status is a fascinating example of the power of discourse—oral histories, biographies, archival research, etc.—to shape our understandings of history and music.”32 By turning to the discourse surrounding

Bolden, it is almost possible to hear his cornet, distorted as it may be by time and selective reporting.

Luckily for researchers, Buddy Bolden was loud. Most first-hand accounts of

Bolden’s musical style emphasize his intense volume. This characteristic is so frequently noted in oral histories that scholars referencing Bolden’s loudness has become a rhetorical commonplace.33 If we know nothing else about Bolden, scholars suggest, we know that he was loud—a point emphasized by the granite cenotaph erected in Holt Cemetery. Etched in stone is an abbreviated quotation from jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton describing Bolden as

“THE BLOWINGEST MAN SINCE GABRIEL.”34 The all-capital lettering typographically echoes the sonic bombast of Bolden’s cornet in silent granite script. Rather than describe the

42 actual sounds that emanated from Bolden’s cornet, fixation on Bolden’s volume draws attention to the difficulty of hearing him through oral and textual sources. Incessantly cataloguing testimonies about Bolden’s incredible volume indexes a latent anxiety about his defleshed memory: the inaccessibility of his sound. Carving Morton’s hyperbole into granite highlights the fact that Bolden was triply muted by institutionalization, death, and the destruction of his sole recording. Texts that stress Bolden’s loudness struggle to prove the existence of an exemplary musical body who did not leave behind physical traces of his sonic work.

In addition to legitimating attempts to remember the music of someone all but lost, accounts of Bolden’s volume redirect attention away from the musician’s actual life and to vestiges of his musical environment manifested by a city whose public space is saturated with the sounds of brass bands. The continuity of brass band traditions in New Orleans made a mock jazz funeral an attractive commemorative option for the Buddy Bolden Planning

Committee. By holding a jazz funeral, the BBPC could easily gesture to Bolden’s role in the early days of jazz. However, the mock funeral ceremony glossed historical details that would have presented Bolden as a threat to norms of sociality and publicity in Jim Crow-era New

Orleans. In effect, the 1996 jazz funeral substituted contextual details of Buddy Bolden’s memory with generic rituals of public remembering. Even so, jazz funeral traditions are rich and complex practices of embodied memory that, in this case, reincorporated Bolden’s defleshed memory into living commemorative traditions through the musical reperformance of his sound and movement. As political scientist Charles Hersch observes of New Orleans, the reperformance of familiar songs “connects present and past, creating a community of sound stretching across time.”35 In this vein, the Olympia Brass Band’s jazz funeral for

Bolden worked to bridge nearly ninety years of institutionally enforced silence. To better understand the reanimation of Buddy Bolden’s defleshed memory, more must be said about

New Orleans’ most resonant musical tradition: the jazz funeral.

Jazz Funerals, Democracy, and Public Mourning

Ritualized funeral traditions offer scholars unique insights into the rhetorical processes of selecting, sustaining, and mobilizing public memories. In New Orleans, jazz funerals are the most culturally significant form of mourning death and celebrating life. Jazz funeral traditions function as a language of mourning and celebration in New Orleans36 that, at their most basic level, facilitate a connection between the dead and the living through ritualized music and movement.37 Jazz funerals can be understood as a way to honor the dead and mark the transition to a new life lived out in the memory of the community.38 As such, by exploring jazz funeral traditions the rhetorical process of reanimating Buddy Bolden’s defleshed memories can come into focus.

Though performance scholar Joseph Roach’s observation that “there is no such thing as a typical jazz funeral” rings true, jazz funerals are not completely structured by the contingencies of a given moment.39 Sakakeeny usefully summarizes what is expected at a jazz funeral, writing that, “The paradigmatic form of the New Orleans brass band parade is the jazz funeral, a burial procession that begins with slow dirges performed on the way to the grave site and ends with up-tempo music and dance after the body is laid to rest.”40 What distinguishes a jazz funeral from other funereal traditions is not that music is played, but that mourning gives way to celebration as an expected part of the tradition. At a predetermined time, the band “cuts the body loose”—a moment punctuated by the brass band’s transition from songs of sorrow to songs of happiness. The family of the deceased are left to bury their

44 loved one, while the second line follows the brass band away from the cemetery to the strains of jubilant music. As anthropologist Sara Le Menestrel puts it, “jazz funerals mark a ritualized separation between life and death, allowing the grieving process to start and, eventually, opening the way toward a reincorporation of the dead into life.”41 A jazz funeral is not simply a ritualized practice for burying the dead, it is a “symbolic language” that organizes and performs public acts of memory.42

In a jazz funeral, a repertoire of songs and physical steps structure the experience of grief and convey specific meanings including sorrow, respect, dignity, celebration, and even joy. Brass band musicians are tasked with articulating both personal and communal feelings of loss and hope through the voices of their instruments. While jazz funerals certainly comfort communities of friends and loved ones, it is too simplistic to interpret jazz funerals as a tradition strictly for the benefit of the living. “In the context of the jazz funeral,” writes

Sakakeeny, “musicians speak through their instruments, creating a sound that New

Orleanians and others interpret as a message to the dead.”43 Both the swaying bodies in the parade and the music of the band participate in this communication, creating an environment where the “wordless voice” of instruments and dancing bodies “speak more ambiguously and inclusively.”44 At a jazz funeral, the voices of instruments take on symbolic roles typically ascribed to human speech, conveying messages of mourning and celebration as the deceased is transported from the realm of the living to the plane of collective memory.45

Instruments operate rhetorically across several symbolic registers at a jazz funeral.

When brass bands play familiar dirges like “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” “Nearer My

God to Thee,” or “I’ll Fly Away,” the tune calls to mind familiar lyrics without the utterance of a single word.46 At this level, songs trigger the shared association of words intended to

45 comfort the bereaved. When a jazz funeral is performed for a musician, the instrument that the musician played takes on special significance. If the musician was a long-time member of

New Orleans’ music scene, songs that they composed or were known to play are usually a part of their jazz funeral. “Quoting”47 the deceased with signature riffs allow musicians to reinject the voice of the dead into the living community.48 Symbolically, quoting is simultaneously a way to honor the achievements of the dead and resist the silencing process of defleshed memory by keeping the musician’s sound alive through the continuity of tradition.

At yet another register, brass band instruments are associated with the voices of a recognizable cast of characters expected to attend funerals. According to Dr. Michael G.

White, leader of the Liberty Brass Band and lifelong jazz curator and historian, at a jazz funeral the trumpet (or cornet) typically sings out “the slow, sad melody with the power of a preacher delivering a sermon.”49 Buddy Bolden was known for his powerful, brassy tone on cornet. Even when he was not playing at funerals, some audiences interpreted Bolden’s cornet as the voice of a preacher.50 At Bolden’s 1996 mock jazz funeral, Milton Batiste’s trumpet simultaneously evoked the traditional presence of a preacher as well as the more specific musical style associated with Buddy Bolden. At this mock funeral, the Olympia

Brass Band shared the imagined sounds of the long-silenced Bolden with a crowd that never heard him play. The voices of instruments at Bolden’s mock funeral stirred up complex associations that mobilized both generic feelings of mourning, hope, and happiness that are a part of all jazz funerals even as they took part in the process of rebodying a more robust memory of Bolden that counteracted the sanitization of his defleshed memory through embodied practice.

Taken together, the voices of brass band instruments structure the experience of a jazz funeral in much the same way that defleshed memories are rebodied through rhetorical acts of discovery and arrangement. Jazz funeral instruments sound out different, yet harmonious elements of the process of grief moving to healing within the framework of community.51 Put in other words, brass bands facilitate communal dialogue through music as a response to the deafening silence of absence.52 The tradition is supposed to lead a community to a cathartic acceptance of death and a reminder of the possibility of renewal and new life to come.53 In so doing, jazz funerals rhetorically, often non-linguistically, “re-create ‘flashes’ of memories” through rhythmic rituals, bodily movement, and voices of instruments mourning and celebrating loudly on the streets of New Orleans.54 That is, jazz funerals are embodied memorial practices that arrest the process of defleshed memory. In addition to shedding light on the rhetorical act of rebodying defleshed memories, jazz funerals also sound out the possibilities of participatory democracy.

Democratic Expressions of Mourning and Celebration

“Between 1895 and 1907, when Bolden was a working musician in New Orleans, more than fifteen hundred black men were lynched in the United States,” writes Krin

Gabbard.55 Against this backdrop of racist violence, brass bands in New Orleans redefined spaces where ordinary boundaries marked by spatial segregation could be stretched and even transgressed by bodies moving in time with music. By the late-nineteenth century, death was a common pretext for parading in New Orleans.56 Funerals with music sponsored by New

Orleans’ various benevolent associations blended European martial instruments, outfits, and music with West African rhythms, movements, and traditions of mourning that became popular expressions of collective grief and affirmations of communal regeneration.57 While

47 brass band funerals and parades often served as tangible expressions of class-based and ethnic solidarity in Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans,58 they also attracted diverse crowds enabling people of color to publicly perform, as musicians in bands and dancers in crowds, without being subject to racist violence.59 Brass bands, therefore, facilitated a free-flowing mixture of people in a restrictive urban setting rigidified by social and legal codes that emphasized racial and class-based difference.60 New Orleans was, and still is, deeply divided along lines of race and class,61 but the nearly inescapable music on the streets creates the possibility for participatory democratic interactions that cut across legal and spatial divisions.62

Much has been made of the potential relationship between jazz and democracy, especially in the works of prominent jazz critics and musicians like Ralph Ellison, Stanley

Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis. Rhetoricians have taken up this line of inquiry, deploying it towards various ends, presenting listening and collective improvisation as a corrective for zero-sum argumentation in contemporary U.S. political culture,63 emphasizing singing as a basic human response to collective trauma,64 and positing a “jazz vernacular” as an affective model of social critique.65 Recently, Gregory Clark picked up these threads in his book Civic

Jazz, arguing that jazz is not only an aesthetic, but also a rhetorical model of democratic life.66 For Clark, jazz sounds out the democratic principle e pluribus unum, calling musicians and audiences to take part in the difficult political work of “sustaining civic life” together.67

In sum, rhetoricians present jazz as a model of democracy because jazz mandates cooperative and reciprocal communicative exchanges across the boundaries of difference. Jazz, like ideal democratic communities, flattens hierarchy, increases public participation, and enacts a collective practice of working together that fosters opportunity for all. While these analyses

48 compellingly demonstrate the uniquely democratic potential of jazz, the examples provided tend to depict musicians as agentive creators and audiences as more-or-less passive receivers.

The musical traditions of New Orleans augment such models of jazz and democracy by highlighting the reciprocal ways that audiences and musicians both enable and nurture each other’s creative capacities.

On New Orleans’ streets, jazz funerals and second line parades create democratic spaces of participatory interaction where the distinct roles of audiences and musicians are productively blurred. For instance, at a recent second line parade, I observed members of the

“audience” using sticks, empty bottles, and occasional street signs to tap out cadences played by the brass band. These second liners helped keep the parade rolling along by giving dancers another unique beat to step to. Additionally, the frenetic dancing of some second liners feeds the band as well, inspiring new riffs on familiar songs.68 These examples demonstrate that the band is far from the only force engaged in listening, generating improvisatory music, and stretching the boundaries of the imaginable in public space; rather, it is the reciprocal exchange between musicians and audiences that create a musical experience worthy of civic emulation.

The public nature of jazz funerals and second line parades means that virtually anyone can participate; which, in some circumstances, opens local traditions up to commodification, appropriation, and voyeuristic consumption.69 However, when the familiar sounds of brass bands spill across streets, the music washes over all listeners, offering each an invitation to participate and not just spectate—a change in both stance and attitude charged with transformative political possibility.70 This democratization of public space through mobile musical traditions is closely related to what Ekaterina V. Haskins calls the

“democratization of public memory” where “memories ‘of the people, by the people,’ harbor the potential to deepen the democratic self-understanding of citizens as agents of history.”71

In New Orleans, brass band traditions act as living repositories of memory that are activated when musicians and crowds come together to musically mourn, celebrate, and remember.72

As New Orleans music scholars Berry, Foose, and Jones cogently put it, “Music is the memory of New Orleans.”73 Jazz funerals, therefore, not only model civic engagement through public participation, they also function as democratic expressions of self- determination for communities of color who have disproportionately borne the brunt of institutional forgetting in New Orleans—as exemplified by Buddy Bolden’s defleshed memory. In such a setting, jazz funerals are ostentatious expressions of collective memory that dramatically assert the public worth of overlooked historical figures and the living communities that maintain their memories. The reanimation of Buddy Bolden’s memory with a mock jazz funeral enacts, in part, this kind of democratic memorial practice.

The Buddy Bolden Planning Committee

“We are standing where Buddy ‘King’ Bolden is presumably buried,” wrote journalist

Lolis Eric Elie in the Times-Picayune on April 22, 1996.

We have to presume that he is buried here in Holt Cemetery because in this raggedy

pauper’s field, no marker identifies King Bolden’s grave. King Bolden is the first

great figure in the history of the music that put this city on the map of 20th century

civilization, and even at this late date, nobody has bothered to mark his grave.74

Reflecting on a tour he took with a group of jazz enthusiasts from England, Elie compared the energy, passion, and knowledge that foreign tourists have for the history of jazz with the apathy, indifference, and ignorance that locals—especially politicians—have for the same

50 past. The prolonged institutional silencing of Buddy Bolden that Elie identified in his editorials is characteristic of defleshed memories. Speaking out against the systemic indifference that led to the slow erasure of historic jazz landmarks in New Orleans, Dennis

Palethrop, one of the English tourists who accompanied Elie to Holt Cemetery, tellingly remarked, “It seems sad that people come all this way to see it all and you have to be told,

‘That’s where it was[’]…I’ve not seen anything yet where somebody’s home or birthplace has sort of been resurrected.”75 One of the biggest offenses, according to Elie, was the failure of the city to memorialize Buddy Bolden. These concerns raised by Elie and voiced by

Palethrop did not go unheard; a resurrection would happen, but it would come in the form of a funeral.

In 1996, Peter Cho, the new chair of the music department at Delgado Community

College, asked Joe Brennan, the college’s new public relations director, if he could draft a press release for the jazz studies program Delgado was planning to launch.76 Brennan agreed, but thought he could come up with something more interesting than a press release. The idea appeared on an April morning during breakfast when Brennan opened the Times-Picayune to the Metro section and read Elie’s editorial. “I…kind of choked on my grapefruit because I had one of those inspirations,” explains Brennan.77 The pieces fell together quickly. After reading the editorial, Brennan remembers thinking,

Wait a minute. Delgado Community College is actually right next door to Holt

Cemetery. I can literally see the cemetery out of my office window. Delgado wants to

start a jazz program. Delgado needs to rebuild trust with the jazz community and

African Americans. What a better way to do that then to do something about this lack

of memory of Buddy Bolden?78

An excited Brennan quickly assembled a team that paired faculty and staff from Delgado with historians, archivists, politicians, journalists, and musicians who were all invested in preserving New Orleans’ unique musical legacy. In a series of meetings between June and

September of 1996, the Buddy Bolden Planning Committee met to “answer three questions:

(1) should we do something to honor Buddy Bolden? (2) if so, what should we do? and (3) how should we do it?”79 The BBPC quickly decided to take two commemorative actions: erect a granite cenotaph in Holt Cemetery and hold a mock jazz funeral on September 6,

Bolden’s 119th birthday.

While traditional jazz funerals usually parade the recently deceased through familiar neighborhoods and past favorite haunts on the way to the cemetery, the idea of a commemorative jazz funeral for someone long dead is not without precedent in New Orleans.

Funerals without bodies—called “mock funerals” by New Orleans musicians—had happened before. There were massive mock funeral processions sponsored by benevolent organizations that hired multiple brass bands for Webster, Clay, and Calhoun in 1852 and again for

President James Garfield in 1881.80 These mock funerals indexed the power of the deceased through grandiose musical tributes that drew substantial crowds across the city. Mock funerals for special places in jazz had also occurred. In fact, the Olympia Brass Band—who was hired by the BBPC to honor Bolden—led mock funerals for the Bourbon House in 1964 and the Caldonia Club in 1971.81 Even more recently, on May 19, 1996, a mock funeral sponsored by St. Augustine Catholic Church paraded to Homer Plessy’s grave in St. Louis

No. 1 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Plessy v. Ferguson.82 When the BBPC chose to hold a mock funeral in honor of “King” Bolden, they tapped into a time-honored

New Orleanian tradition that resonated powerfully in their contemporary environment. In

52 effect, mock jazz funerals in New Orleans are expedient ways to attract public attention and signal the institutional power and prestige of the deceased through a recognizable tradition closely associated with the birth of jazz.83 To hold a mock funeral for Bolden—a practice reserved for white statesmen in the century of Bolden’s birth—constitutes a remarkable reversal in institutional valuation for a man who was condemned to spend the rest of his life in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at the age of 29.

The BBPC planned for two hundred participants to attend the commemorative event,84 but the final attendance was closer to one thousand.85 In the weeks leading up to the mock funeral, Brennan and Marquis drummed up publicity by writing press releases, drafting scripts for local radio stations, sending editorials to the Times-Picayune, soliciting the help of an educational PR firm who printed brown flyers designed to “look historic,” and inviting members of the City Council and Mayor Marc Morial to speak at the ceremony.86 Brennan explains that detailed plans for the mock funeral were choreographed in advance, including starting the ceremony at 6:00 p.m. “so that the local TV news channels would do a live shot standing in front of our college’s signature, iconic building with the procession coming by.”87

Another publicity victory for the BBPC came from the City Council who decreed on the day of the mock funeral,

BE IT PROCLAIMED BY THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS that this Council

recognizes: // Charles “Buddy” Bolden // The Legendary Jazz Pioneer // on the

occasion of // the unveiling of a memorial marker in his honor. // BE IT FURTHER

PROCLAIMED, That this Council applauds his musical innovations which helped to

create jazz music, the sound that made New Orleans famous around the world.88

City Council’s proclamation, the mayor’s speech, press coverage in television and print, and recognition from institutions of higher learning all indicate that by 1996, in the estimation of

New Orleans’ cultural and political elite, Bolden’s memory was properly sanitized for public consumption. Speaking with journalists after the event, Mayor Morial suggested that commemorating Bolden was a means to the end of promoting jazz tourism. “We’re recapturing and recognizing our importance on the international stage as the founding city of jazz,” explained Morial.89 Remarking on the frequent appropriation of “black parading idiom[s]” by politicians and commercial interests, anthropologist Helen A. Regis writes that mock jazz funerals—like the one held for Bolden—are hardly “more than a staged minstrel pageant.”90 While Regis overstates the case, the fact that a ceremony in honor of Bolden came 64 years after his death and 89 years after his institutionalization indicates that

Bolden’s defleshed memory, far from a threat, could be embraced for its potential as an advertisement.

Cutting the Body Loose

What Michael Calvin McGee observes about fragmentary discourse resonates with the present discussion on defleshed memory. “The discourse is silenced, dismissed and forgotten,” McGee writes, “if it seems uninteresting or irrelevant; but if it matters, the discourse will be remembered, structured into our experience.”91 By holding a mock funeral for a nearly forgotten jazz pioneer, the Buddy Bolden Planning Committee made Bolden’s defleshed memory matter to city government, higher education, and business elites. Bolden was converted into a potent, yet politically neutral, advertisement for Delgado’s jazz program and for the city’s heritage tourism. The BBPC was even awarded a gold medal in the special events category from the Bulldog Awards—a national organization that honors corporate

54 communications and public relations.92 Even though Bolden’s mock funeral was driven by commercial interests, the embodied memorial event exceeded its advertising goals. That is, through the mock funeral, Bolden’s defleshed memory was reincorporated into the living memory of New Orleans’ brass band community. In the words of BBPC member Peter Cho,

Bolden’s mock funeral allowed the gathered community “to actually commemorate his spirit and actually bring, if you will, his spirit to the present time so that we could all celebrate.”93

The king is dead and his remains scattered, but his memory—as anyone who danced behind the Olympia Brass Band in Holt Cemetery can confirm—lives on through music.

Following Buddy Bolden’s long-overdue jazz funeral, Joe Brennan and historian

Michael Mizell-Nelson traced the reincorporation of the jazz pioneer’s defleshed memory into local traditions. Together, in partnership with Delgado Community College and WYES-

TV, they produced a five-and-a-half-minute documentary about Bolden’s mock funeral.

Funded by a small grant from the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, the documentary was released later in 1996. “Buddy Bolden: First King of Jazz” is not easy to come by; Joe Brennan still has the master tape on miniature videocassette in Albany, New

York, and I found a copy on VHS in the “Buddy Bolden Jazz Funeral Collection” at Tulane

University’s Hogan Jazz Archive. Despite its relative inaccessibility, the short documentary tellingly demonstrates how defleshed memories can be rebodied and reanimated as parts of living commemorative traditions.

True to the genre, the documentary endeavors to “capture the sights and sounds of this historic tribute and provide an in-depth look at the real Buddy Bolden through commentary from musicians and scholars.”94 Narrated by trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis— member of New Orleans’ eminently musical Marsalis family— “Buddy Bolden: First King

55 of Jazz” weaves footage from the September 6, 1996, mock funeral with interviews from saxophonist Harold Battiste, Olympia trumpeter Milton Batiste, and Bolden biographer

Donald M. Marquis. Throughout the short production, Bolden is figured as a “ladies man,” a mentally unstable alcoholic, and the mythic first king of jazz. The interviews and still images of Bolden interspersed throughout the documentary craft an historical portrait of Bolden.

However, by the end of the documentary, Buddy Bolden the historical figure pales in significance compared to Buddy Bolden’s living legacy. This subtle shift in emphasis is facilitated by both the music in the documentary and interviews with New Orleans musicians.

Live recordings of the Olympia Brass Band in Holt Cemetery bookend “Buddy

Bolden: First King of Jazz.” An embellished snare drum tap-off rolls into the characteristic

New Orleans-style street cadence to kick off the documentary. A shrill whistle-blast precedes the Olympia’s horns as they swell into the exuberant spiritual “May the Circle Be

Unbroken.” Twelve seconds in, interviews with Harold Battiste and Milton Batiste push the

Olympia—by now accompanied by joyful singing—to the background where the music continues behind the voices of interviewees and the narrator. Marquis and Marsalis take turns charting Bolden’s ascension to stardom in New Orleans while the background music fades from the 1996 live recording of the Olympia into Jelly Roll Morton’s rendition of “Buddy

Bolden’s Blues” recorded in 1939. Morton’s colorful reminiscences about the early days of jazz helped establish the mythic significance of Buddy Bolden as “the most powerful trumpet in history.”95 In the absence of Bolden’s legendary wax cylinder, the 1939 version of

“Buddy’s theme song” increases in volume, leveling out as Morton sings the evocative opening lyrics: “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say…”96 As with the granite cenotaph in

Holt Cemetery inscribed with Morton’s famous hyperbole about Bolden’s intense volume,

56 the documentary, too, relies on Morton’s voice—this time preserved as an audio recording instead of etched in stone—as a stand in for the absent Buddy Bolden. The song that the

Buddy Bolden Brass Band made famous is relayed to listeners on the other side of a temporal gap too large for Bolden to be heard directly. Morton’s vocals mediate Bolden’s sound to listeners through a posthumous musical tribute that imagines a connection, ever so tenuous, with a past no longer accessible.

The inaccessibility of Bolden’s defleshed memory is dramatized in the documentary when Marquis—the only non-musician featured—rehearses Bolden’s “sporting life,” struggle with alcoholism, institutionalization, and eventual death and burial. During this segment, the music drops out completely, mimicking the muting of Bolden’s cornet. The music picks back up as Marsalis pivots from the loss of Bolden to the “historic tribute” organized by the BBPC in 1996. Again, a live recording of the Olympia Brass Band at Holt

Cemetery saturates the background of the documentary, but this time the band is in the middle of the Carnival standard “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” As the documentary concludes, a reflective Milton Batiste compares Bolden to contemporary New Orleans musicians explaining, “So, we’re like today’s Buddy Bolden, we’re still doing the same thing. Might be in a different key, but we doing the same thing: making people happy.”97 The shot switches from Batiste’s interview to footage of the trumpeter leading both the Olympia

Brass Band and dancing second liners out of Holt Cemetery. Batiste suddenly cuts off the band by swinging his uplifted hands down and proclaiming, “That’s it!” The screen goes black and viewers of the documentary are left with the sound of a crowd laughing at the abrupt cessation of music.

Milton Batiste’s closing observation that New Orleans’ musicians are “like today’s

Buddy Bolden” echoes the first words of the documentary offered by Harold Battiste. “Each of us as a player,” explains Battiste, “and people who just love music and who like to second line and do everything, we can imagine that Buddy Bolden and his peers were doing the things that we want to do.”98 From the perspective of these musicians, despite the dearth of historical information regarding Bolden, the failure to preserve the sole recording of the

Buddy Bolden Brass Band, and the refusal to publicly commemorate his musical achievements until they were useful as advertisements for commercial interests, the defleshed memory of Bolden is imaginatively reassembled by musicians who carry on the very musical traditions that Buddy Bolden helped create.

Following Bolden’s institutionalization, a litany of New Orleanian cornetists and trumpeters either laid claim to Bolden’s abdicated title or had the monarchic honorific bestowed upon them by fans. The list includes “King” Freddie Keppard, Joe “King” Oliver, and, of course, “King” Louis Armstrong. Each of these musicians resisted the process of defleshed memory by inheriting Bolden’s legacy as heirs to his throne, occupying and expanding public space first carved out by Bolden. Indeed, even before the 1996 mock funeral, musicians in New Orleans identified Milton Batiste as “a natural successor to Buddy

Bolden.”99 Of course, the tradition continues beyond Batiste; his own son, “King” Richard

Matthews, for instance, served as grand marshal for the Olympia at Bolden’s mock funeral.

For musicians, commemorating Buddy Bolden with a memorial marker and a jazz funeral— even if both arrived six decades after Bolden’s burial—acknowledges the trailblazing cornetist’s irrevocable presence in the sonic traditions of the city. The language of mourning and celebration spoken by brass instruments still saturates the streets of New Orleans.

Defleshed memories that are forcibly cleansed of their historical and political contexts will continue to serve commercialized interests in New Orleans and elsewhere. However, vibrant rituals of public memory—like jazz funerals—hold open the possibility that defleshed memories can live on as more than mere advertisements, that they can be rebodied through the living traditions of caring communities.

The 1996 mock funeral in Holt Cemetery, like many mock funerals, did not match the depth and complexity of “King” Bolden’s life.100 The tragedy of Bolden’s everyday experience in New Orleans, discussed by Don Marquis in Brennan and Mizell-Nelson’s documentary, was largely elided in favor of a heroic celebration of the pioneering jazzman’s accomplishments. Bolden’s history of alcoholism and womanizing, in this reminiscence, are transmuted into excusable expressions of fun-loving, laissez les bons temps rouler attitudes that typify contemporary touristic accounts of New Orleans’ history. The patterns of mental illness and domestic abuse that, in combination with Louisiana’s Jim Crow legal system, landed Bolden in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum fall out of the celebration completely. If

Bolden’s life is imagined as a jazz funeral, the solemn and occasionally frenzied dirges that punctuated his existence were truncated and replaced in 1996 with the exuberant and uplifting music of the second line. Today, all that remains of Bolden’s defleshed memory are the good times of his musical legacy.

And yet, somewhat ironically, Bolden is most remembered by musicians and music scholars for loudly playing the blues in a danceable tempo. As a musical form, the blues does not avoid pain; in fact, the blues cannot exist without deliberately facing tragedy head-on.

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness,” writes Ralph Ellison, “to finger the jagged grain, and to

59 transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”101 Riffing off Kenneth Burke’s formulation of tragedy and comedy,

Ellison continues, “As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”102 Based on accounts of those who heard him play, the music performed by Buddy Bolden is best understood as an expression of the blues sung through the bell of his cornet.103 Bolden’s contemporaries might recognize Ellison’s description of the blues as a reference to Bolden’s own musical style. For Ellison, the blues can be conjured up in the “the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound.”104 The heroic figure of Buddy Bolden reanimated by the second line at his mock funeral in 1996 is only part of the picture; the lamentations and wailing of the dirge-like blues is a necessary companion to the celebratory music.

For the purposes of this study, the blues can be productively imagined as a musical form of memorial coping that willfully and artistically engages the ongoing presence of traumatic experiences from the past. Far from side-stepping trauma, the blues, as an artistic and critical impulse, guides individuals and communities muddling through tragedy. The next two chapters in this study follow the lead of the blues, both abstractly as a narrative form and concretely as a musical performance, exploring the dirge-like responses of New

Orleanian communities to collective trauma. Rather than ignoring the presence of calamity or attempting to drown out tragedy through joyful expressions of life, the following two cases recognize the necessity of a blues-inflected memory to, in the words of Ellison, “finger the jagged grain” of collective pain in order move forward.105

1 Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 54.

2Colten, 68.

3 John McCusker, Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz (Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 54; Krin Gabbard, Hotter Than That: The Trumpet,

Jazz, and American Culture (New York: Faber and Faber, 2008), 16.

4 Donald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 120-21.

5 Marquis, 116-17, 124-27.

6 Marquis, 132.

7 Colten, 67-68.

8 Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2000), 149-153.

9 Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s

Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 17.

10 See Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction:

Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and

Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott. (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 2010), 1-54.

11 See Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999).

12 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,”

Representations 26 (1989): 8.

13 Interview with Ryan Gray, February 6, 2017.

14 Gray.

15 Marquis, 133.

16 Marquis, 133.

17 Gray.

18 Gerhard Kubik, “The Mystery of the Buddy Bolden Photograph,” The Jazz

Archivist 22 (2009): 4-18; Marquis; Clive Wilson, “The Bolden Photograph: A Photographic

Examination,” The Jazz Archivist 22 (2009): 19-24.

19 Marquis, 4-6.

20 Bruce Boyd Raeburn, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 56.

21 Colin Hancock, “The Bolden Cylinder Project,” The Jazz Archivist 28 (2015): 26;

Marquis, 107.

22 Gabbard, x.

23 Marquis, 159.

24 Interview with John McCusker, October 13, 2016.

25 McCusker, interview.

26 Gabbard, 10.

27 Hancock, 26; Marquis, 107.

28 Michael G. White uses the phrase “loudly absent” to describe the effect of trumpeter Doc Paulin’s death in New Orleans. Emphasis in original text. Michael G. White,

“Dr. Michael White: The Doc Paulin Years (1975-79),” The Jazz Archivist 23 (2010): 18.

29 Gabbard, 10.

30 Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary

Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 279.

31 Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory

Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 2 (1995): 224-25.

32 Matt Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,” Black Music

Research Journal 31, no. 2 (2011): 310.

33 Gabbard, 15-16; Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds: Race and Birth of Jazz in

New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 79; Marquis, 102-03; McCusker,

Creole Trombone, 55.

34 “He was the blowingest man ever lived since Gabriel. They claim he went crazy because he really blew his brains out through the trumpet. Anyhow he died in the crazy house.” Jelly Roll Morton as quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly

Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz,” (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2001), 60.

35 Hersch, 136.

36 Interview with Lolis Eric Elie, January 20, 2017.

37 Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2013), 166-67; Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up

From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II (Lafayette: University of

Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2009), 319.

38 Sara Le Menestrel, “Memory Lives in New Orleans: The Process and Politics of

Commemoration,” Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective, ed. Romain Huret and

Randy J. Sparks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 173-74.

39 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1996), 277.

40 Emphasis in the original text. Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory

System,” 305.

41 Le Menestrel, 171.

42 Berry, Foose, and Jones, 318;

43 Sakakeeny, Roll With It, 166-67.

44 Sakakeeny, Roll With It, 166-67.

45 Berry, Foose, and Jones, 319; Sakakeeny, Roll With It, 163-68; White, “Dr.

Michael White,” 10.

46 My thanks to Matt Sakakeeny for encouraging me to think about the layering of textual resonances when popular songs from New Orleans’ brass band repertoire are played on the streets.

47 Gregory Clark, Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of

Getting Along (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 10.

48 Sakakeeny, Roll With It, 58-59.

49 White, “Dr. Michael White,” 10.

50 Gabbard, 7-8.

51 Helen A. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second

Line,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 763.

52 Sakakeeny, Roll With It, 175.

53 Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “Faith, Hip-Hop, and Charity: Brass-Band Morphology in

Post-Katrina New Orleans,” in Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective, ed. Romain

Huret and Randy J. Sparks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Park, 2014), 142-44.

54 Richard Brent Turner, Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 91.

55 Gabbard, 29.

56 Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,” 305.

57 Jack V. Buerkle and Danny Barker, Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black

Jazzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 188; Roach, 61-63; Sakakeeny, “New

Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,” 307-10; Matt Sakakeeny, “Resounding Silence in the Streets of a Musical City,” Space and Culture 9, no. 1 (2006): 42; Sakakeeny, Roll With

It, 17-20; Michael P. Smith, A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music (Dallas:

Taylor, 1990), 31; Jack Stewart, Funerals With Music in New Orleans (New Orleans: Save

Our Cemeteries, 2004); Michael G. White, “The New Orleans Brass Band: A Cultural

Tradition,” in Triumph of the Soul: Cultural and Psychological Aspects of African American

Music, ed. Ferdinand Jones and Arthur C. Jones (Westport: Praeger, 2001), 84; Michael G.

White, “Reflections of an Authentic Jazz Life in Pre-Katrina New Orleans,” Journal of

American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 823.

58 Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band

Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1.

59 Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,” 306-07; Raeburn, New

Orleans Style, 43.

60 Sakakeeny, “Resounding Silence,” 42; Samuel B. Charters, Jazz: New Orleans

1885-1963 (New York: Oak, 1963), 3.

61 Lynnell L. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and

Historical Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 17-23.

62 Raeburn, New Orleans Style, 43.

63 Joyce Irene Middleton, “Finding Democracy in Our Argument Culture: Listening to Spike Lee’s Jazz Funeral on the Levees,” in Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts ed.

Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011),

163-179.

64 T.R. Johnson, “Ghost Music: Silence and Listening in the Post-Katrina Ninth

Ward,” Minnesota Review 84 (2015): 102-13.

65 Lisa M. Corrigan and Amanda N. Edgar, “‘Not Just the Levees Broke’: Jazz

Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke,”

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 99.

66 Clark, 83-115.

67 Clark, 85.

68 White, “Dr. Michael White,” 9.

69 Corrigan and Edgar, 87; Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the

Contested Landscape of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no.

4 (1999): 474.

70 Regis, “Second Lines,” 496.

71 Ekaterina V. Haskins, Popular Memories: Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 5.

72 Le Menestrel, 173-174; Turner, 91.

73 Berry, Foose, and Jones, 323.

74 Lolis Eric Elie, “New Orleans Orphaned,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA),

April 22, 1996, Metro B1.

75 Elie, “New Orleans Orphaned,” Metro B1.

76 Interview with Joseph Brennan, January 19, 2017; Interview with Peter Cho,

January 30, 2017.

77 Brennan.

78 Brennan.

79 Don Marquis Collection, “The Buddy Bolden Project: Minutes, Wednesday, June

12, 1996,” Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

80 “The Screwmen Annual Parade of This Powerful Organization, Celebrating Labor

Day With Spirit and Numbers,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), Nov. 26, 1892, 3.

81 Richard B. Allen, vertical file: “Olympia Brass Band (1970-1971),” Hogan Jazz

Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Mick Burns, The Great Olympia Band (New

Orleans: Jazzology, 2001), 86; Clarence Doucet, “Bourbon House Declared Dead: Famous

Names, Locals Mourn Alike,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), Oct. 1, 1964, Section 1:

10.

82 Robert Florence, New Orleans Cemeteries: Life in the Cities of the Dead (New

Orleans: Batture, 1997), 57; Jerome G. LeDoux, War of the Pews: A Personal Account of St.

Augustine Church in New Orleans (Donaldsonville: Margaret, 2011), 385; Turner, 100.

83 Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,” 310.

84 Don Marquis Collection, “The Buddy Bolden Project: Minutes, Wednesday, June

26, 1996,” Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

85 Brennan.

86 Interview with Kathy Cain, January 30, 2017.

87 Brennan.

88 Don Marquis Collection, “New Orleans City Council: Proclamation,” Hogan Jazz

Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

89 Don Marquis Collection, “VHS: Media Coverage of Buddy Bolden Jazz Funeral,

9/6/1996,” Videocassette, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

90 Regis, “Second Lines,” 496.

91 McGee, 281-82.

92 Brennan.

93 Cho.

94 Don Marquis Collection, “Buddy Bolden: First King of Jazz,” Narr. Delfeayo

Marsalis, Prod. Joe Brennan and Michael Mizell-Nelson, Delgado Community College,

1996, Videocassette, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

95 Lomax, 60.

96 Don Marquis Collection, “Buddy Bolden: First King of Jazz.”

97 Don Marquis Collection, “Buddy Bolden: First King of Jazz.”

98 Don Marquis Collection, “Buddy Bolden: First King of Jazz.”

99 Burns, The Great Olympia Band, 87.

100 McCusker, Creole Trombone, 54; Gabbard, 16.

101 Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act, (New York: Quality

Paperback Book Club,1964): 78.

102 Ellison, 78-79.

103 Marquis, 100-02.

104 In this passage, Ellison describes the blues as sung by Bessie Smith as a way of explaining the “lyrical prose” of Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy. Ellison, 79.

105 Ellison, 78.

CHAPTER TWO

St. Anna’s Murder Board:

Memorializing New Orleans’ Victims of Violence

I beat all but the first few raindrops of a storm to St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the morning of February 7, 2017. In two hours’ time the storm would turn into a full-fledged tornado that touched down on the other side of the Industrial Canal, demolishing several homes, businesses, and churches in New Orleans East.1 Without expecting anything more than the scattered showers that regularly bring rain on one side of a New Orleans’ block and sun on the other, I stepped off Esplanade Avenue and into the cover of a shallow overhang, pressing an outside intercom, identifying myself, and quickly moving inside after the door buzzed open. I entered the yellow, two-story Victorian house that St. Anna’s converted into a multi-purpose complex that includes a parish hall, kitchen, offices, and school rooms. Back in 2010, I helped repaint one of the downstairs offices a light eggshell blue while spending my senior spring break, like so many other college and high school students after 2005,

Figure 2.1. Close-up picture of the Murder Board and a wider-angle picture of the Murder Board as it extends across the garden wall. Photos taken by the author in February 2017.

70 volunteering and touring New Orleans. Overly anxious about morning traffic, I arrived at

1313 Esplanade Avenue twenty minutes early on a sweetly humid, stormy February morning in New Orleans.

I showed up on St. Anna’s doorstep because of the Murder Board, a three-by eight- foot tan coroplast board affixed to the yellow brick of the church and easily viewable from the street (see Figure 2.1). Printed at the top of the board in slanting black cursive script is

Psalm 46: “God is our hope and strength a very present help in trouble.”2 Bordering the psalm is a line break accented with a small cross centered over a bolded title that reads,

“Murder Victims 2016.” Underneath this unadorned heading begins a two-columned list of the dates of death, names, ages, and methods of death for every person murdered in the New

Orleans metro area in 2016. All the information is professionally printed except for what has been added since August 23, 2016—these dates, names, ages, and methods of death are handwritten in all capital letters with a black permanent marker. Beneath the two columns is another line break, echoing the one above; this one is accented with a larger cross. Smaller yellow boards extend horizontally across the brick wall of a garden to the right of the main board (see Figure 2.2). These panels contain the same murder information dating back to

2007 in a font-size hard to read from a distance greater than five feet. This is the “Murder

Board,” the public face of St. Anna’s Victims of Violence ministry. As journalist Brendan

McCarthy notes, the Murder Board stands out in New Orleans precisely because its approach to memorializing differs so markedly from the city’s icons of death: flamboyant jazz funerals and ornate cities of the dead. “In a city that greets death with dance steps,” writes McCarthy,

“The List stands out for its stoicism. Stacked in columns, the names reside under the curt

71 heading: ‘Murder Victims’”3 The vertical rows bear simple testament to the ongoing violence in New Orleans. Each name stands in for a body that no longer moves through the city.

Figure 2.2. Close-up image of printed and handwritten names from August through October 2016. Prayer box and shaded garden wall of the Murder Board as seen from sidewalk. Photos taken by author in February 2017.

Like chapter one, this chapter engages the problem of making unmourned lives visible for seemingly indifferent communities. However, instead of a mock jazz funeral designed to rebody defleshed memories nearly lost to time, as was the case with Buddy

Bolden, the cenotaphic memorial in this chapter works to alter perceptions of a fractured city.

More specifically, through their Victims of Violence ministry, St. Anna’s Episcopal Church endeavors to humanize the lives of thousands of homicide victims and in so doing, change the attitudes and actions of the living through a blues-inflected memory.4 As I learned from interviews with its designers, Deacon Elaine Clements and Fr. Bill Terry, the Murder Board was erected to resist the normalization of violence in a city with an exceptionally high homicide-rate, one that disproportionately afflicts young black men. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and news coverage, this chapter conducts a rhetorical analysis of the Murder Board’s commemorative protest. In particular, this chapter explores

72 how the public inscription and display of names of victims of violence resist collective dehumanization in the face of seemingly perpetual violence. Rather than avoiding the pain of their community or overwhelming experiences of trauma with expressions of joy, like the

Buddy Bolden Planning Committee did with their 1996 mock funeral, St. Anna’s Murder

Board directly and publicly addresses the profound loss of life in New Orleans through a cenotaphic memorial. Like Ellison’s paradoxical figure of “a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound,” the Murder Board as a place of mourning and memory, performs the blues, offering no particular antidote, but stirring a need for individual and social transformation nonetheless.5

In order to analyze the rhetorical memory work conducted by the Murder Board, this chapter proceeds in five parts. First, this chapter presents the Murder Board as an important addition to public memory scholarship concerning cenotaphic memorials. The second section introduces New Orleans’ recent history with violence to contextualize St. Anna’s adoption of the Victims of Violence ministry. This historical context establishes the Murder Board’s originary exigence. The third section examines the rhetorical function of the Murder Board as an act of inscription that challenges popular statistical models of representing homicide in the city. Further, this section examines the Murder Board’s role as a welcoming sign to the

Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. The fourth section identifies extreme reactions to the

Murder Board as examples of the rhetorical potency of the cenotaphic memorial as a site of civic instruction. The chapter concludes by evaluating the rhetorical problems and possibilities associated with an ever-expanding memorial.

Cenotaphic Naming

As Craig Rood recently observed about national debates concerning gun violence,

“The dead have long been cast into a central role in our public talk and sight and thus regularly used to justify collective action, including federal policy.”6 Rood elaborates, arguing that, “the warrant of the dead is an ethical claim that we have an obligation to those who died. The living are called on to act and the dead are invoked as justification for that action.”7 While Rood focuses on how President Obama deployed the “warrant of the dead” in speeches after mass shootings, he acknowledges, citing the AIDS Memorial Quilt, that the warrant of the dead is not a rhetorical approach confined to speeches.8 In fact, one of the more obvious places that the dead “instruct” the living is in commemorative architecture and memorials.9

In the United States, when it comes to commemorations of the dead, the Vietnam

Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. looms large in both scholarly and popular imaginations. As Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr. observe in their

1991 rhetorical analysis of the Memorial, “The critical commentary it has engendered as well as its extraordinary rhetorical power have rendered the Memorial an artifact of considerable significance.”10 They continue, arguing that, “The rhetorical power of the Memorial is multiplied by its reach. It has enormous drawing power, and it is ‘reproduced’ and

‘replicated’ in popular culture products, thus expanding the range of possible impact.”11

Since its opening in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has served as the formal benchmark by which other memorials in the United States are judged. Carole Blair and Neil

Michel note in 2007, “that many of the memorials following in the wake of the VVM

[Vietnam Veterans Memorial] during the final two decades of the twentieth century and

74 extending into the first decade of the twenty-first took up elements of its rhetoric, appropriating and adapting it to their own ends.”12 The now-iconic reflective black granite and the listing of names of the dead are two of the Memorial’s most poignant and duplicated features. While listing names certainly did not originate with the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial, it is regularly “credited in popular discourse with having initiated the practice.”13

St. Anna’s Murder Board is one example of a memorial that drew inspiration in both design and rhetorical approach from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While the names written on the Murder Board are not carved into reflective granite, and though the list of names on the Murder Board grows with every new homicide in the greater New Orleans area, both memorials make political statements that demand action from the living—what Rood calls the “warrant of the dead.”14 In my interviews with Deacon Elaine Clements and Fr. Bill

Terry, the creators of the Murder Board, both brought up the Vietnam Veterans Memorial without prompting. Deacon Clements explained that the Murder Board was originally imagined as a “Vietnam Memorial” for murder victims.15 While describing the persuasive appeal of the Murder Board, Fr. Terry stated that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is his

“favorite parallel.”16

Despite the many similarities between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the

Murder Board, it is not safe to presume that the Murder Board’s act of naming is the same as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s act of naming. That is to say, the rhetorical work accomplished by listing names is not the same from one context to another. As Carole Blair argues with regard to her work on commemorative architecture with Neil Michel, “The specific point of our project is that naming is not naming is not naming. It may appear to be a common rhetorical feature of the memorials, but ‘it’ is not, for there is no unified ‘it,’ in

75 terms of rhetorical function.”17 For instance, while both the Murder Board and the Vietnam

Veterans Memorial list names of the dead, the Memorial offers no words of solace to visitors while the Murder Board explicitly appeals to divine providence as a source of hope and comfort. Additionally, the list of names on the Memorial is static and more-or-less complete, while the list of names on the Murder Board are hand-written on a weekly basis and subsequently printed on an annual basis.18 These differences are not trivial; they serve categorically different purposes that are obscured when the presumption is that “cenotaphic memorials” are more-or-less the same.19 The rest of this chapter will focus on the rhetorical function of naming conducted by the Murder Board. In particular, this chapter will examine the Murder Board’s humanizing and community-building approach, along with the limits of naming as a commemorative genre. Parallels with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—and other memorials—will only be drawn to highlight the granular particularity of both.

“Paying Faithful Attention”20

Murder in New Orleans is easily misapprehended as extraordinary. In fact, since the

1980s, New Orleans has consistently been listed amongst the top ten cities in the United

States with the highest murder rates per capita. Like other urban centers, the effects of rising violent crime did not spread evenly across New Orleans’ communities. Anthropologist Helen

A. Regis remarked in 1999 that:

White flight and uneven development in New Orleans have produced an ever

widening gap between rich and poor, which has its spatial correlates in the growth of

depressed or blighted ghettos beset with widespread poverty and unemployment as

well as environmental crises and crime.21

The geographic compartmentalization of poverty resulted in a sharp increase in crime in poor, largely black, areas of the city that was exacerbated by the levee failures in 2005 and further gentrification since 2005.

Of course, violence spills outside the boundaries of “bad neighborhoods,” occasionally prompting newspapers and the city’s economic elite to decry violence as “a black eye for tourism.” This complaint is especially loud when shootings on Bourbon Street, or other destinations frequented by tourists, make national news.22 Despite the occasional crossing of invisible boundaries, violent crime is generally localized in what police and city officials call “hot spots,” leaving disproportionately poor and black populations that reside in those sections of the city to bear the brunt of the burden.23 Regis summarizes the situation facing the city’s residents, writing, “Although crime fear affects New Orleanians of all races, social classes, and ethnicities, African Americans are at much greater risk of being victims of violent crime.”24

The Murder Board began in 2007 after the disastrous flooding in 2005 forced a majority of New Orleanians to evacuate the city. This mass exodus changed the way crime was statistically reported. The New Orleans Police Department did not calculate crime-rates for 2005 due to high fluctuations in the city’s population brought about by Hurricane Katrina.

By 2006, crime statistics once again became available. Despite the gradual, yet steady, decline of New Orleans’ homicide-rates from 1994-2005, by the end of 2006, as New

Orleanians slowly returned and newcomers planted roots, murders spiked again. In 2007, there were 209 total murders in the city, resulting in a homicide-rate that climbed from 37.6 the previous year to 94.7 per 100,000 residents.25 Because of New Orleans’ depleted postdiluvian population, the 2007 homicide-rate eclipsed the previous high of 85.8 recorded

77 in 1994 even though there were 215 fewer murders in 2007 than in 1994.26 And yet, the psychological, institutional, and communal effects of violence are hardly capturable in homicide-rate statistics.

To families and friends, a sudden death, even by natural means, can be catastrophic.

However, the sheer frequency of homicide in New Orleans makes violence and death shockingly normal for some communities beset by a lack of economic opportunities, underperforming public schools, hyper-surveillance by police, and an over-abundance of drugs and firearms. District Attorney for Orleans Parish Leon Cannizzaro acknowledged the dire state of affairs in 2016, reporting that, “Some high school students have told me that it is easier for them to get a gun in their neighborhood than it is for them to go and find a textbook.”27 In such an environment, violence and death can create numbness. In fact, a debilitating feeling of numbness was the primary exigence for erecting the Murder Board, according to Deacon Clements. “And, you know, one of the things that we began to talk about a lot in ministry development is how dangerous numb is because then we fail to notice and care,” said Deacon Clements.28 Fr. Terry struggled to describe the effect of quotidian violence on the city in our interview, saying that “It creates a sense of despondency and darkness, and when it happens with the regularity it does in New Orleans, there is a developed sense of—acceptance is maybe the wrong word, but that’s as close as I can come to it—of this…being the status quo.”29

Experiencing murder as a banal occurrence is not unique to St. Anna’s parishioners or

New Orleanians in general. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Stephen P. Depoe argue that human beings have a remarkable capacity for acclimating themselves to all manners of painful routines. In fact, for Pezzullo and Depoe, “the everyday functions discursively to attenuate

78 crisis.”30 By this they mean that routinized parts of everyday life rhetorically blunt the impact of what may otherwise be considered extraordinary. In extreme cases, like the nuclear pollution that Pezzullo and Depoe document, the regularity of death meant that “dying became part of everyday life,” and by extension ceased to be meaningful as an event worthy of note.31 Critical theorist Lauren Berlant describes such a situation as “crisis ordinariness,” or the “diffusion of trauma through the ordinary.”32 In some New Orleans neighborhoods, murder is a nearly normal part of life, especially for populations forced to deal with death day-in and day-out.

In 2007, the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana charged Deacon Elaine Clements, a native of Texas living in New Orleans, with establishing a ministry at St. Anna’s that would post-date her year-long tenure at the church. Frustrated by a post-Katrina spike in violent crime and the daunting task of slowing the escalating rate of murders in New Orleans,

Deacon Clements met with Fr. Terry and asked, “Bill, what are we going to do about the problem of violence? It’s really a concern to your congregation.” She quickly added, what was bothering her most, “We can’t solve murder.”33 Recalling the conversation in a separate interview, Fr. Terry remembers replying with an abbreviated quotation he attributes to social activist Fr. Daniel Berrigan, “The charism of social justice should never depend on outcomes, but rather doing social justice is transformative in and of itself.”34 Both Deacon Clements and

Fr. Terry remember this comment bringing both relief and renewed fervor. “We’re not called to solve it,” Deacon Clements remembered thinking. “We’re called to be faithful. Called to respond. And…I thought, ‘Okay, I can do that. We can pay attention.’”35

Deacon Clements began asking friends for suggestions, and she kept hearing the refrain, “We ought to march on the Mayor’s office every week until something is done.”36

Dissatisfied with the infeasibility of organizing weekly demonstrations, Deacon Clements pondered her options. Eventually, in a conversation with Dr. John D. Clements, her husband and professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University, they came up with the idea of carrying a symbol of grief and commemoration. Deacon Clements recalls that her husband casually remarked, “Well, if we’re going to march, we ought to take a rose or something in our hands.”37 Shortly thereafter, Deacon Clements instituted the Victims of

Violence ministry at St. Anna’s and literally carried a single rose for every person killed in the New Orleans metropolitan area to the Mayor’s office, the Chief of Police, and the District

Attorney’s office on a weekly basis. Along with roses, St. Anna’s parishioners making the deliveries brought a list of the names of the people murdered the previous week, explained the symbolic significance of the roses, and stated, “we are praying for the victims, we’re praying for the survivors, the families, we’re praying for the perpetrators, we’re praying for you.”38 To Deacon Clements’ surprise, the new ministry was not greeted with warmth.

With a laugh, Deacon Clements recollected her first delivery of roses to the DA’s office. Describing herself and her friend as “nice little church ladies,” she remarked,

[T]he first time we took them [roses] to the DA’s office, my friend and I took them and we had to go through the scanner to make sure we didn’t have guns or anything, and we went through and the way we were received, we got back outside the door—we just left them and said our little thing and then walked out—and I looked at my friend and I said, “You ain’t a terrorist are you?”—[laugh]—I mean, we were being…we were…the suspicion was huge.39

In spite of resistance, Deacon Clements persisted. Eventually the hard edge of suspicion softened and some city officials began to recognize the roses as expressions of care rather than condemnation. Even so, the Victims of Violence ministry continued to encounter

80 skepticism and occasional hostility. Deacon Clements told me that a St. Anna’s parishioner accidentally delivered a rose for a person killed in neighboring Jefferson Parish—which is part of the metro area but not part of New Orleans proper—to the New Orleans police station. Deacon Clements, who did not make this particular delivery, remarked that, “the person who received the roses pulled a rose out and said, ‘This one’s not ours’ and gave it back to the person who was delivering the flowers.”40 According to Deacon Clements, this sort of adversarial attitude was an all-too-common reaction to the Victims of Violence ministry.

Out of the weekly flower deliveries came the idea to list the names of murder victims in a more permanent commemorative way. Fr. Terry offered the front of the church to the

Victims of Violence ministry, and together, he and Deacon Clements collaboratively created their own “Vietnam Memorial” for murder victims.41 Soon, the first panel of the Murder

Board was professionally printed with the names of those killed in the New Orleans metro area in January 2007 and installed on the front of St. Anna’s facing Esplanade Avenue. But the speed of murders outpaced the church’s ability to print new names, so Fr. Terry began writing names down by hand with a ruler and a marker; which brought with it “a certain poignance” of its own.42 In Fr. Terry’s words, the act of inscribing names is “a spiritual discipline for me….And it is a very sacred moment [because] in doing that…one starts to appreciate the deep and profound loss of human life.”43 After 2007, and Deacon Clements’ departure from St. Anna’s, Fr. Terry kept the ministry going, professionally printing the names for murder victims annually while keeping a separate board up to date by hand.

Every week in New Orleans, newspapers report new deaths brought about by violent means. The daily persistence of violence in New Orleans brings about, in Fr. Terry’s words,

81 a sense of “despondency and darkness” that slowly festers into what Deacon Clements calls a dangerous “numbness.”44 Accelerating apathy and indifference, according to the Murder

Board’s creators, is the common representation of the dead as mere data points in police reports, news headlines, and legal and academic reports. Against this datafication of human life, the Murder Board works to humanize the departed and reorient attitudes of the living to include a broader definition of who counts as neighbors.

Humanizing Through Inscription

Before my interview with Fr. Terry in 2017, I sat and waited on a sofa just outside the priest’s office. Sitting behind a desk across from me was Luigi Mandile, the Parish

Administrator for St. Anna’s. When I arrived, Mandile was busy at his computer searching for the past week’s murder victims so Fr. Terry could add them by hand to the Murder Board.

It usually takes Mandile about an hour to create a complete list of murder victims. He primarily uses the Times-Picayune and New Orleans Advocate’s websites to find the names.

The job clearly takes a toll on him. Mandile told me that the task was recently dropped in his lap after a staffer in the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana’s office Uptown on Seventh Street suddenly quit. As Fr. Terry opened his office door and invited me in, Mandile spoke out loud to his computer, “Okay, did they get murdered or did they just get shot?”45

Against an environment saturated with the persistent trauma of violence, homicide, and hyper-surveillance, the Murder Board performs the seemingly simple rhetorical act of inscription that creates a standing record different in nature from other catalogues of murder victims such as police reports, legal briefs, and news headlines. This distinction is important to the St. Anna’s community. New Orleanians, in their observation, have learned how to cope with legal data, and even some sensationalized news media, that adopts the language of

82 statistics to tally deaths in the city.46 In an interview with Darryl Durham, Program

Coordinator and Community Liaison for St. Anna’s, Durham told me that back in 2007, when the Murder Board was first erected, “people were beginning to see these murders as just a regular thing. And they were just beginning to see these individuals as just a number or a name in the paper. And so, the Board went up there initially to really humanize who these individuals were.”47 Unlike running lists of crime data, the names of the deceased on the

Murder Board are written in full view of the public on the side of a church. They cannot be folded up and recycled like an old newspaper or scrolled past like a social media feed.

Further, the fact that names are handwritten adds a reverential component to the list that digitally amassed statistics do not. Handwriting, as anyone who has taken the time to write thank you notes knows, takes patience, thoughtfulness, and time. In the case of the

Murder Board, Fr. Terry—who usually adds the new names—uses a ruler to ensure that the lines remain straight. Fr. Terry is very aware of the difference that handwriting names makes.

For him, the act of writing the names of the deceased on the Murder Board is nothing short of a sacred discipline.

Simply naming victims has a lot of power to it because it does so without judgment.

So, if you look at our memorial to the victims of violence, the larger of the two walls,

it simply lists name, age, and by what source the violence was perpetrated. Shot,

stabbed, vehicular homicide. And so, with that there is a spiritual gravitas that arises

out of simply naming.48

The practice of inscription is so profound for Fr. Terry that he regularly asks seminarians training for the priesthood at St. Anna’s to add new names to the Murder Board.

Rhetorically, the Murder Board operates in a manner similar to the wall of names built in the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor. In both cases, the list of names “marks a tension between bodily presence and absence, functioning not quite as a gravestone, but not quite as a wall of the missing either.”49 The Murder Board is a cenotaphic memorial that calls attention to the unacknowledged dead who continue to be murdered throughout the city.

However, the Murder Board is not like the U.S.S. Arizona or the walls of the missing that

Blair argues “are predicated upon the material body as the preferred locus of ritual memory.”50 Instead, the locus of ritual memory with the Murder Board is an Episcopal church, an imperfect manifestation of God’s community on earth. That is, the warrant of the dead expressed by the Murder Board places the onus of memory and change on a living faith- based community. This belief is given fuller expression in the ceremonial reading of murder victims’ names.

As Durham, Fr. Terry, and Deacon Clements all separately pointed out in our conversations, the importance of the Murder Board is not merely its silent testament to death in the city, but the weekly reading of the names of murder victims every Sunday during the

“Prayers of the People” section of the church service. “Every Sunday we read the names of every murder victim,” explained Fr. Terry. “We continue to do that.”51 St. Anna’s also shares the compiled list of names once a week with every Episcopal church in the diocese and interested non-Episcopal churches.52 One of the churches in the diocese that joins St. Anna’s in the practice of weekly recitations of the names of murder victims broadcasts their church services on the radio. Deacon Clements recalls a time that a parishioner objected to reading the names of murder victims on the airwaves. The parishioner, who did not know that

Deacon Clements was involved in the Victims of Violence ministry, argued that, “it just

84 doesn’t look very good for the city of New Orleans.” Deacon Clements candidly replied,

“You know the Church is not in the public relations business. It’s not our job to make the city look good.”53 In addition to the weekly Prayers of the People, St. Anna’s also reads the name of every person added to the Murder Board in the previous year as part of their All Saints

Day mass. Taken together, in addition to the inscriptions on the Murder Board and the weekly readings, every person murdered in the New Orleans metropolitan area has their name read out loud in St. Anna’s Episcopal Church as part of a mass twice a year. This does not count the number of times the names are included in masses held at other churches in

New Orleans.

The ritualized inscription and reading of names work in tandem. The Murder Board operates as a semi-permanent memorial that bears plain testament to the ongoing killings in the city. Many of the victims named on the Murder Board come from circumstances where the city’s lavish jazz funerals and ornate sepulchral architecture is out of the question for the mourning family. It is, quite simply, economically infeasible for the bereaved to commemorate their loved ones in quintessential New Orleans fashion. Fr. Terry remembers speaking with a grieving mother who could not afford to memorialize her son. After talking about the circumstances that led to her son’s death, Fr. Terry recalls that, “she then thanked me and said she didn’t think anybody cared about her son and that this wall gave her a great deal of comfort because now her baby would be remembered.”54 Fr. Terry took it a step further, explaining in our conversation that because of the Murder Board, “all the mothers that lost their children [through violence] would not have their babies forgotten.”55 The

Murder Board, in other words, stands as a physical memorial committed to keeping the names of victims of violence in the public eye in perpetuity.

Although fleeting in nature, the liturgical reading of names during the Prayers of the

People speaks the dead into the memory of the living.56 On its own, the Murder Board, like newspaper headlines can be ignored—albeit with difficultly. The prayerful recitation of names by St. Anna’s and partner churches extends the act of commemoration to more than those who walk by the Murder Board on Esplanade Avenue. The reading of names serves as a oral reminder of loss. In much the same way that the physical act of inscribing names on the Murder Board is a memorial practice that engages the body, the act of reading names aloud in community extends memories of the dead to a communal body. The Prayers of the

People, then, incorporates the memories of the dead into ongoing liturgical rituals that are likely to outlive any physical monument attached to the front of a church. By inscribing names and reading them out loud, St. Anna’s Victims of Violence ministry demonstrates a commitment to the dead, solidarity with the bereaved, and a purposeful mission of healing communities torn asunder by violence. Importantly, St. Anna’s efforts to counter the perceptual disposability of the dead does not end with the Murder Board and the “Prayers of the People.”

During our interview, Fr. Terry told me about St. Anna’s after-school arts program, which he explained is an extension of the Victims of Violence ministry. The purpose of the program is to break the “cycle of violence” by getting children “off the streets” and providing them with educational opportunities that they do not get in school.57 Instead of rattling off statistics about how overexposed New Orleans’ children are to drugs and violence, Fr. Terry launched into a story. One afternoon, the children attending St. Anna’s after-school program were given a writing prompt: “Tell me about your neighborhood.” Quoting one girl’s response, Fr. Terry said, “‘My daddy’s best friend went to go meet another best friend…and

86 they shot him four times in the head.’ That was her answer to, ‘Tell me about your neighborhood.’”58 The girl’s response was not anomalous. “[E]very one of the seven answers we got from the seven kids in that class was explicitly violent,” said Fr. Terry.59 As Fr. Terry told it, the story acknowledges the impossibility of a memorial transforming a community on its own. For Fr. Terry, and those who work with him at St. Anna’s, engaged communal intervention at the structural level is the best chance New Orleans has to stop cycles of violence.

A joyful side effect of the Murder Board, according to Darryl Durham, is that communal outreach has expanded tremendously since 2007. When Durham first attended St.

Anna’s, it was a predominately white church in a predominately black neighborhood. Since

2007, in opposition to the gentrifying trends in the Tremé, the demographics of St. Anna’s has begun to change. Somewhat ironically, the grim message of the Murder Board attracted people to St. Anna’s, according to Durham. In effect, Durham explains, the Murder Board says, “You’re welcome here.”60 Durham elaborates, “[O]n a psychological level, I think that the Board is saying to people, you know, ‘Hey, if those guys are willing to put that outside their church then they’re willing to allow us to come in.’”61 The open stance of St. Anna’s, in

Durham’s estimation, has made a difference in the community.

I think again, this is a way that this church community is actually effecting change

because what started as a board has now developed into this full-blown program

working with children, working with their families, working with large numbers of

disenfranchised individuals from the LGBT communities. So, you know, all these

communities that…are now interacting with St. Anna’s all started with that Board out

there.62

Inscribing and speaking the names of murder victims publicly recognizes that a human life is lost and that lives are worthy of mourning. This should not be confused with the blithe slogan, “all lives matter”; rather, the naming of murder victims in New Orleans is a revaluation of life—often lived in precarious circumstances—without judgment of how the life was lived. It is also a reintroduction of lives, previously deemed disposable, into public memory and therefore back into everyday life. As Durham put it,

The calling out of their names during services was done so that people would realize

that whether this was a drug dealer, or whether this was the person who committed

the murder, or whatever, they still were a human being and they still had a soul and

somewhere along the way something went wrong for that person.63

Taking up the topic of the devaluation of human life in New Orleans, Fr. Terry explained one of his roles as rector of St. Anna’s. “[M]y job is to point out to you that these are human beings and that no baby is born with an AK-47 in the crib. No baby is born suckling on a nine-millimeter Glock.”64 The Murder Board assigns significance to lives that are easily overlooked in New Orleans; an accomplishment made possible by cenotaphic naming. This kind of naming is borne out of deliberate practice, careful attention, handwriting, and ritualized communal enunciation.

Prompting Reactions

In some ways, the Murder Board functions like the memorial t-shirts commonly printed in New Orleans to commemorate the loss of a friend or family member. As Helen A.

Regis puts it, “The shirts, worn by living bodies, are made to stand for those very bodies that are missing from the second line. They mark an empty space, a void, making present in the streets of the city the absence of the dead.”65 While a list of demographic data may seem to

88 elide the corporeality of death in its accounting, Fr. Terry argues that the list serves to humanize murder statistics. “Numbers are very easy to deal with emotionally,” argued Fr.

Terry in an interview with CNN. “I want people to squirm. I want people to feel uncomfortable about the murders going on in the city.”66 According to Fr. Terry, this is precisely the effect that the Murder Board has. “There’s a moment of silence;” states Fr.

Terry about those he has witnessed observing the Murder Board,

there’s a sense of awe; there’s almost an epiphany experience for most people that see

it. They look at the “murder board” and you can see crystallizing...the realization that

these are human beings and that we are literally in a holocaust, we are slaughtering

human beings. It’s very transforming.67

When I met with Fr. Terry, I did not have to ask him specifically about the transformative potential of the Murder Board, he brought it up unprompted at several points in our conversation. The story that most starkly illustrated Fr. Terry’s belief in the transformative potential of the Murder Board revolved around a police officer—a “grizzled veteran”—who responded to an incident at St. Anna’s. Fr. Terry described the officer as “the kind of guy you would never argue with…[laugh]…if you’re smart.”68 Once the incident was resolved, the officer stopped in front of the Murder Board. What happened next is best shared as a transcript from the interview, because it encapsulates what Fr. Terry regularly witnesses and has come to expect from the Murder Board.

And he asked me, just kind of pointed his chin towards the perimeter of the memorial

and said, “What’s that?” And I said, “That’s the Victims of Violence.” And he said,

“In the state?” And I said, “No, in the metropolitan area.” And he got very quiet and

he walked over there and he started, literally, at one end and took about 15 minutes

and he read, I guess, every name on that board. And I was still standing in front of the

church and he came up to me—and the man literally had tears running down his

eyes—and said, “I had no idea.” Then he took a deep breath and said, “seven of my

high school friends are on that board.” And then he just kind of walked away.

Fr. Terry summed up the story, saying,

Well, I’ve got to believe that, going back to Elaine Clements, that effected a change.

It’s immeasurable, it’s not quantifiable, but in some subjective yet real way that

officer is, or was, different after experiencing that wall. How that works out on the

streets, and how that works out in his job performance, I have no idea because I didn’t

track him, he wasn’t a scientific study. But from a human enterprise standpoint, he

was transformed if nothing else than for that time and understood the gravity of what

we’re all dealing with. Maybe he left overwhelmed.

While Fr. Terry’s story is deeply moving, unfortunately, there are counterpoints, as two of

Durham’s stories made clear.

Durham prefaced his stories by saying, “So, each person has their own take on the

Board.” A few years earlier, a white St. Anna’s staffer witnessed a white motorcyclist stop in front of the Murder Board. The biker, after seeing the staffer, “looked at the Board and started laughing, like ‘Ah, yeah they’re killing each other.’”69 This shocked the St. Anna’s staffer who “realized in the moment that he was dealing with a racist, that he was dealing with someone who had strong, racial feelings and he [the biker] was looking at the Board because he saw black people killing black people.”70 Similarly, in 2011, an unknown vandal scrawled “Heil Mary” and “Juden” on prayer cards in front of the Murder Board. A kneeling angel statue in front of the Murder Board was also spray-painted with a symbol of the Aryan

90 nation.71 Durham recounted, “at one point we had a kneeling angel out there and they broke the fingers off the angel and they defaced some of the cards and they, you know…defaced the Board a little bit. So, again, you know, the Board causes reactions.”72

Of course, the stories shared by Fr. Terry and Durham are extreme. I sat across the street from St. Anna’s on a sunny weekday afternoon in early-February to see how people interacted with the Murder Board. Alerted to the fact that a lot of the foot traffic in the neighborhood is generated by tourists staying in AirBnBs, I was curious to see how outsiders would react.73 Of the ten people that passed in an hour-long period, two stopped briefly to look at it, three glanced, but kept walking, and five did not look at the Murder Board at all.74

No one stayed long enough to read the first panel, much less all the names on the Board. That being said, I was there, and I spent a whole hour writing about the Murder Board.

Ever-Expanding Memorial

A major source of the Murder Board’s rhetorical power comes from the fact that every person killed in the New Orleans metropolitan area is listed on the Board. However, this strength also raises questions about the sustainability of such a commemorative project.

Fr. Terry, for his part, is committed to keeping the Murder Board up “for as long as I’m a priest here.”75 To St. Anna’s credit, the parish community has maintained the Murder Board for over a decade and weaved it into their liturgical practices. Even so, the long-term future of the board is cloudy.

In my conversation with Darryl Durham, he candidly remarked with a wry laugh that,

“I can honestly say that we haven’t really sat down and thought strategically about where we’re going to go with this Board. I mean, even to the extent of what are we going to do when we run out of space? You know…we actually have run out of space.”76 Durham is not

91 exaggerating. Stepping out of the rain into St. Anna’s annexed Victorian house in early-2017,

I paused before ascending the steps to the second floor for my interview with Fr. Terry. I saw resting under the stairwell behind two filing cabinets covered in used paint rags, three candelabras, and a bin filled with drills and power cords, a long panel from the garden wall

Figure 2.3. Missing panel from the garden wall portion of the Murder Board. Photo taken by author on February 7, 2017. section of the Murder Board. Looking closer, I discovered that this panel listed the names of murder victims from January 2013 to January 2015; over 300 names not included because the church ran out of wall space for its exterior display (see Figure 2.3).77 I snapped a quick picture with my phone of the disturbing abundance of names before trudging up the flight of stairs to meet with Fr. Terry.

Even with the missing panels, the Murder Board continues to get larger and larger as new names are added on a weekly basis. For Deacon Clements, the sheer number of names on the Murder Board and the fact that the number is growing ‘is both its strength and its weakness.”78 On the one hand, the flexibility of the Murder Board’s rudimentary design allows the memorial to keep pace with the number of homicides in the city. On the other

92 hand, somber reflection on the lives of individuals lost may be blunted by a sheer wall of names. As Durham explained, his reactions to the Murder Board fluctuate from experience to experience. When Durham first encountered the Board in 2017, “I saw the Board and I was like, ‘ah, that’s really sad that that’s going on.’” After working with St. Anna’s for a while and committing himself “to try and interrupt what was going on on the Board,” the Murder

Board became a regular part of his daily routine.79 However, Durham revealed that for folks who work at St. Anna’s long enough, there will be moments when the gravity of the Murder

Board hits uncomfortably close to home.

[T]he first real shocking experience was when one of our little eight-year-old kids

said, “Oh, that’s my auntie up there.” I was like, “What?” And she’s pointing out the

name of her aunt who had died at the age of 22 through violent means. So…our

experiences with the Board—those of us who have been here for a long period of

time—we almost, kind of…it almost becomes a part of our everyday experience and

we almost forget the significance of it.80

For Fr. Terry, however, concerns that the Murder Board is losing its transformative power are unfounded. In addition to the story of the police officer, Fr. Terry offered the Vietnam

Veterans Memorial as an analogy. Comparing various prominent memorials in Washington,

D.C., Fr. Terry made a case for the unique power of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

But there is a certain holiness to the Vietnam Memorial. And what is it? It’s black

slabs of granite with names on it—hundreds and hundreds of names on it. And so, the

power of that memorial comes from naming in the same way that as this permanent

memorial expands, I think it gains more power and becomes even more sacred in its

transformative potential. And it doesn’t depersonalize…it really doesn’t.81

Regardless of whether the Murder Board humanizes victims of violence today in the same way that it did in 2007, the cenotaphic memorial invites passersby to pause and reflect on the monotonous continuity of violence in New Orleans.

St. Anna’s Murder Board works with the flows of the city, causing ripples that reconfigure the meaning and experience of New Orleans. Like the Civil Rights Memorial outside of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, that “literally interrupts the path of pedestrians,” the Murder Board arrests the movement of people on the street, exhorting them to heed the humanity of their tragically departed neighbors through a design that is immediately recognizable as a memorial.82 One of the primary problems that the Murder Board was built to confront was the perceived lack of value placed on human life in the city; especially the lives of young, black men.83 Enabling desensitization to violence, according to Fr. Terry, is the fragmentation of New Orleans largely-segregated neighborhoods; an ossification of boundaries that discourages human interaction across borders.84 Conspicuously missing from the Murder Board is location information.85 Neither the neighborhood where the violence took place nor the home neighborhood of the victim is included. When first asked about the omission of neighborhoods, Deacon Clements shrugged and said with a laugh, “We ran out of room.” But a few moments later she revised her response, saying,

I don’t want it to be a neighborhood program. There are, of course, neighborhoods

that are much more dangerous. But I don’t want it to be that. I think that’s a way of

saying, “Well, it’s them not us.” And I want it to be, “It’s us. This is us. This is what

we are doing. We are killing a generation of mostly black, young men.”86

Deacon Clements’ explanation indicates yet another way that the Murder Board resists the statistical norms established in police reports and news coverage. Rather than localizing violence in “hot spots” and crime maps, the Murder Board, through the omission of neighborhoods, strives to engender a feeling of collective responsibility.

Before St. Anna’s began their Victims of Violence ministry, Fr. Terry came to realize that he, like many other New Orleanians, measured the significance of each murder by its proximity to his own neighborhood. This way of accounting was dramatically altered in 2005 when a 17-year old young man was shot to death less than 30-yards from his house.87 Fr.

Terry explained in a short video interview that, “The police prevented me from approaching the boy for fear of quote ‘contaminating the scene.’ I couldn’t give the kid last rites.”88

Recounting the story in a separate interview, Fr. Terry explained, “That’s when I realized it doesn’t matter where the murder is in the city. We’re all responsible.”89 Omitting neighborhoods reminds viewers of the humanity of lives that are too often represented as mere statistics. According to Fr. Terry,

When a child is murdered what we will hear is, “John Doe and Mary Jane were shot

in a drug deal gone bad” and what we hear is “drug deal gone bad.” We tend to forget

their names. We begin to paint a mental image of a gangbanger or somebody really

heinous. What the Murder Board does is sort of take that out of the equation and

remind us at the end of the day that these are human beings. In many, many cases

what we see are people who find themselves in a life style or life circumstances that

are deadly. And they get shot. And they die.90

The perceptual isolation of neighborhoods in New Orleans fuels enthymematic rationalizations of statistics, filling in blanks with stock prejudices. From this standpoint, the

Murder Board operates as a rhetorical intervention, disintegrating arbitrary neighborhood boundaries. In the place of extent borders, the Murder Board proclaims the existence of a whole-New Orleans community, one that values every life, not just the lives in a particular neighborhood. “We may not be our brother’s keeper,” explains Fr. Terry, “but we certainly hold their lives, or should hold their lives as sacred.”91

The message, however, does not stop at the borders of Orleans Parish. As Deacon

Clements put it, “I hope people never take away that it is just our problem.”

This is urban America’s problem, in the same way that Hurricane Katrina revealed

what already existed here, if you stripped away the façade of any urban environment

in this country, you’re going to find the same thing. You’re going to find poverty and

racism. And, you know, a health care crisis, and guns, and violence.92

The Murder Board, therefore, offers viewers a synecdochal perspective. Focusing on New

Orleans metro area invites visitors to see the universal in the particular. In the pain of one

human death, the trauma of an entire city emerges. In

the trauma of a city, the scourge of a country unfolds,

and vice versa. The broader appeal of the Murder

Board is perhaps most apparent in the geographic

outliers on the Murder Board. St. Anna’s has included

the names of those killed in mass shootings in

Newtown, Connecticut; Charleston, South Carolina;

Figure 2.4. June 12, 2016 entry for the and Orlando, Florida (see Figure 2.4). When I Pulse Dance Club shooting in Orlando. Photo taken by author in February 2017. followed up with Fr. Terry via email about these exceptions, he wrote back that, “The depth and emotional outpouring of those mass shootings

96 really demand recognition alongside of our localized violence…. Cultural and symbolic solidarity is not lost on us.”93

Whether or not the Murder Board creates transformative experiences for people who encounter it, as I myself have done, and seen others do, the Murder Board’s blues-like memory stops people in their tracks. Once pedestrians pause and look, the possibility of transformation is unlocked. As Darryl Durham pointed out, the Murder Board “causes reactions.” For Durham, the Murder Board “causes people to think—whether they think the way we think is another story—but it at least causes people to react to the fact that this is going on in our world.”94 At a minimum, the Murder Board, as an ever-extending cenotaphic memorial, continuously performs the blues, providing an interruption to everyday movements in the city, changing everyday flows and directing attention to lives made violently absent. These pauses are themselves rhetorical responses to violence in the city. Put in other words, these pauses momentarily dramatize the Murder Board’s demand that violence in the city must be faced rather than passed by as yet another part of everyday life.

1 Fieldnotes, “Rosenwald Hall Rm. 230, Dillard Univ.,” February 7, 2017.

2 Information in this chapter about what is currently hand-written on the Murder

Board is accurate as of February 7, 2017.

3 Brendan McCarthy, “Church’s List Mourns Every Murder Victim,” Times-Picayune

(New Orleans, LA), July 27, 2007,

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/07/churchs_list_keeps_names_of_ci.html.

4 This is not to say that the Murder Board is unrelated to New Orleans’ more joyful celebrations of life following death. On the contrary, St. Anna’s has a long history of supporting New Orleans music through second lines, jazz funerals, and other events that

focus on the city’s musical traditions. The Murder Board is best thought of as an extension, rather than a departure from, New Orleans’ jazz funeral culture. The Murder Board stands as a visual dirge; a solemn expression of mourning that is an integral part of jazz funeral traditions. For an example of the close relationship between New Orleans music and the

Murder Board, watch the following interview with Fr. Bill Terry. The interview ends with Fr.

Terry explaining that, “The Murder Board is now very much a part of the identity of being a parishioner here at St. Anna’s.” In the video, Fr. Terry’s closing comment is edited over footage of the Storyville Stompers playing “God is Mighty” during St. Anna’s annual Palm

Sunday second line. New Orleans music, in other words, is an integral part of the church’s identity as well. “State of the Re:Union—New Orleans: Murder Board,” State of the

Re:Union, uploaded July 28, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mWRfb1ex6w.

5 Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act, (New York: Quality

Paperback Book Club,1964): 79.

6 Craig Rood, “‘Our Tears Are Not Enough’: The Warrant of the Dead in the Rhetoric of Gun Control,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 1 (2018): 49.

7 Rood, 48.

8 Rood, 49.

9 Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., “Public Memorializing in

Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech

77, no. 3 (1991): 263.

10 Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, 263.

11 Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, 263.

12 Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary

Culture of Public Commemoration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (2007): 597.

13 The quotation is italicized in the original text. Carole Blair, “Reflections on

Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001), 280.

14 Rood, 48-49.

15 Interview with Deacon Elaine Clements, January 31, 2017.

16 Interview with Fr. Bill Terry, February 7, 2017.

17 Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 282-83.

18 Names are periodically added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the behest of the Department of Defense. Instructions on how to apply to add a name are available on the

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund website. http://www.vvmf.org/adding-a-name.

19 The quoted prhase is italicized in the original text. Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 278.

20 Clements.

21 Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New

Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 4 (1999): 476.

22 For example, on November 2, 2011, the Times-Picayune reported that “New

Orleans officials scrambled Tuesday to restore a sense of calm to a citizenry on edge hours after two gunmen opened fire on a crowd of costumed Halloween revelers on Bourbon Street in an act of carelessness that was shocking even in a city inured to street violence. It was one of five separate shootings over the holiday that left two dead and 14 others injured, with most of the mayhem centered in the tourist hub of the French Quarter.” Danny Monteverde,

“Bloody Halloween Ends with 2 Dead, 14 Hurt, City Reeling—Mayor, Police Chief Blame

City’s ‘Culture of Violence,’” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), November 2, 2011,

National, A01.

23 Richard A. Webster, “Proposal Takes Aim at Jackson Square—Some Fear Effects on Artists, Performers,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), February 24, 2017, National,

A01; Tim Morris, “N.O.’s Public Safety Plan: Shut the Front Door,” Times-Picayune (New

Orleans, LA), February 1, 2017, Metro, B08; “How We Can Stop the Killing in New

Orleans,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 19, 2016, Reflections, E02.

24 Regis, “Second Lines,” 476.

25 “New Orleans Crimes and Rate: 1990-2014,” NOLA.gov, accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.nola.gov/getattachment/NOPD/Crime-Data/Crime-Stats/Historic-crime-data-

1990-2014.pdf/.

26 “New Orleans Crimes and Rate.”

27 Leon Cannizzaro as quoted in, “The New Orleans Pipeline: Stolen Weapons Fuel

Street Violence,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), November 2, 2016, http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/02/new_orleans_stolen_guns.html.

28 Clements.

29 Terry.

30 The quotation is italicized in the original text. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Stephen P.

Depoe, “Everyday Life and Death in a Nuclear World: Stories from Fernald,” in Public

Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life, ed. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 86.

31 Pezzullo and Depoe, 96.

100

32 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 81-82.

33 Clements.

34 Terry.

35 Clements.

36 Clements.

37 Clements.

38 Clements.

39 Clements.

40 Clements.

41 Clements; Terry.

42 Terry.

43 Terry.

44 Terry; Clements.

45 Fieldnotes, “St. Anna’s Episcopal Church, Esplanade Ave (1313),” February 7,

2017.

46 Terry; Clements; Interview with Darryl Durham, January 27, 2017.

47 Durham.

48 Terry.

49 The quoted phrase is italicized in the original text. Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 279.

50 Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies,” 281.

51 Terry.

52 Clements.

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53 Clements.

54 Terry.

55 Terry.

56 The writing and reading of names performed by St. Anna’s Episcopal Church is akin to the #SayHerName campaign launched in the wake of Sandra Bland’s death in 2015.

According to the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), the organization that launched the

#SayHerName campaign, “The #SayHerName Movement responds to increasing calls for attention to police violence against Black women by offering a resource to help ensure that

Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice, policy responses to police violence, and media representations of police brutality.” For more on the aims of the AAPF, see “Say Her Name,” AAPF, accessed Feb. 7, 2018, http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/.

57 Terry.

58 Terry.

59 Terry.

60 Durham.

61 Durham.

62 Durham.

63 Durham.

64 Terry.

65 Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory,” 766.

66 Randi Kaye and Jason White, “Names of Victims Fill Church’s ‘Murder Board,’”

CNN, August 29, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/28/murder.board.nola/index.html?eref=yahoo.

102

67 Kaye and White.

68 Terry.

69 Durham.

70 Durham.

71 Leslie Williams, “Treme Church Vandalized with Aryan Nation Symbols,” Times-

Picayune (New Orleans, LA), November 18, 2011, http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/11/treme_church_vandalized_with_a.html.

72 Durham.

73 Durham.

74 Fieldnotes, “St. Anna’s Episcopal Church, Esplanade and Marais, 1:25pm,

2/1/2017.”

75 Terry.

76 Durham.

77 According to NOPD statistics, 306 people were murdered in New Orleans in 2013 and 2014. “New Orleans Crimes and Rate.”

78 Clements.

79 Durham.

80 Durham.

81 Terry.

82 Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s

Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 46.

83 “State of the Re:Union.”

103

84 “State of the Re:Union.”

85 There are several notable exceptions that I will discuss later in this chapter.

86 Durham.

87 Eliot C. McLaughlin, “Fed Up, New Orleans Looks to Shake Murder City Title,”

CNN, March 3, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/us/new-orleans-murder/.

88 “State of the Re:Union.”

89 McLaughlin.

90 “State of the Re:Union.”

91 “State of the Re:Union.”

92 Clements.

93 Terry.

94 Durham.

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CHAPTER THREE:

“Burying the Past”:

Dillard University’s Jazz Funeral for Katrina

In the wake of the catastrophic levee failures that inundated New Orleans in 2005, jazz funerals and second line parades captured the imagination of a nation looking for evidence of “resilience” in a devastated city.1 In fact, as Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of the

William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, points out, “the restoration of cultural practices associated with African American brass bands, especially ‘second lines’ and ‘jazz funerals,’ has been used repeatedly in the media as a barometer of the city’s recovery efforts.”2 For instance, two and a half weeks after the flood, President George W.

Bush extolled the “triumph of the spirit over death” as exemplified by jazz funeral traditions.3 Five days later, a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden began and ended with funeral music and processions led by the Rebirth Brass Band.4 Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke concludes with a mock jazz funeral for Hurricane

Katrina that processed through the bleak and empty streets of the Lower Ninth Ward.5 Again, on August 29, 2010, a mock jazz funeral for Katrina marked five years after the storm by marching through the French Quarter.6 And, on August 28, 2015, just a day shy of ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, Dillard University, an historically black institution in New Orleans, held an event titled “Jazz Funeral: Burying the

Past.”

As I demonstrated in chapter one, mock jazz funerals are a local cultural tradition that

New Orleanians commonly deploy to pay homage to important deceased figures or to make particular pasts feel palpably present. However, unlike the 1996 mock funeral for Buddy

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Bolden that sought to rebody the defleshed memories of an all-but-forgotten pioneer of jazz,

Dillard’s jazz funeral worked to symbolically lay traumatic memories of Katrina to rest so that Dillard, and the broader Gentilly neighborhood-community, could move on. In this chapter, I argue that Dillard’s mock jazz funeral did not encourage forgetfulness or work to obscure painful memories of breached levees; nor did the commemoration consign communally experienced traumas to an inaccessible and unspeakable past. Rather, the mock funeral symbolically reoriented memories of Katrina outside of the defining and ongoing present by re-consecrating the university’s campus. Rhetorically, the jazz funeral for Katrina resituated memories of the storm, placing them within Dillard’s ever-extending history.

Seizing on citywide commemorative energy surrounding the tenth anniversary of Hurricane

Katrina, Dillard’s K10 committee mobilized New Orleans’ most venerated ritual of mourning and celebration, the jazz funeral, and leveraged the symbolism of the Avenue of the Oaks, the most “sacred place” on Dillard’s campus, to officially recognize the devastation wrought by

Katrina one last time.7

In order to explore the ways funerary traditions have been used to rhetorically reorient memories of trauma carved into the cityscape, this chapter begins with a brief discussion of the enduring legacy of traumatic memories of Hurricane Katrina at Dillard

University. The next section provides a brief history of Dillard’s campus with special attention paid to the Avenue of the Oaks as a sacred landscape in need of memorial re- consecration after the 2005 floods. Next, I draw on ethnographic fieldnotes taken during the

2015 jazz funeral for Katrina to demonstrate how the commemorative event combined local traditions with sacred landscapes to craft a narrative of communal healing and progress.

Finally, I conclude by examining how conventional jazz funeral tropes were rhetorically

106 mobilized to help the Dillard community focus on gains made over the last decade while resituating the 2005 floods from the defining moment in Dillard’s history to just another part of Dillard’s history.

Scarred Landscapes

In late-August 2005, Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans. The flood traumatized New Orleanians, scarring indelible reminders of personal and communal catastrophe into the living landscape of the city. Such reminders pock Dillard University’s campus. Dillard officials, led by President Marvalene Hughes—who was in her second month as president—made the difficult decision to evacuate shortly before Katrina’s landfall.

Dr. Dawn Williams, a professor at Dillard and Academic Advisor for Educational Talent

Search, recalls “looking out at the sea of freshman students” standing behind the Kearny

Building shortly after they arrived. “The next weekend we were telling the students, ‘Pack your things. We’re evacuating the campus.’”8 The choice to evacuate proved prescient. On

August 29, the London Avenue Canal breached in two locations filling Dillard’s campus with as much as ten feet of Lake Pontchartrain’s brackish water.9 The water receded to between two and five feet, where it stood for three weeks.10

The floodwaters devastated the campus. Because of the university’s proximity to the breach along the London Avenue Canal, Dillard was the hardest hit of all of New Orleans’ colleges and universities.11 Thirty-two buildings had to be rebuilt, costing approximately

$400 million.12 Every building on campus sustained severe flood damage except Lawless

Chapel. Dr. Williams called that “divine intervention.”13 Rev. Earnest Salsberry, chaplain and Dillard alum who served on the K10 planning committee, called it “ironic” before explaining that the chapel is “a little bit higher than most areas on campus.”14 Dillard ceased

107 operations for the entire fall semester, resuming in the spring with depleted numbers of faculty, staff, and students. Because all of Dillard’s dormitories were destroyed by flooding or fire, Dillard held spring semester classes off campus at the Hilton Riverside hotel.15

Expecting approximately one quarter of the student body to return for the spring, Dillard’s administration was actually forced to turn away students when roughly half wanted to come back.16 “We were surprised. You might say shocked,” President Hughes explained to the

Washington Post.17 Making the best of their peculiar situation, students jokingly referred to the hotel campus as “Dilton.”18

However, the disaster that began in late-August 2005 did not conclude when the floodwaters receded. As writer and activist Rebecca Solnit put it in her reflection on Katrina,

“Disasters begin suddenly, but they never quite end...”19 Such was certainly the case for

Dillard University. The flood scarred the cityscape to such an extent that reminders of the devastation are still easily visible throughout New Orleans twelve years later. This is especially true in hard-hit neighborhoods like Gentilly. For instance, on my way to Dillard in

2017, I saw several houses with the infamous Katrina “X” spray painted on them. First responder crews tagged houses with the FEMA code in early-to-mid-September as they searched structures for safety hazards and survivors. I told Dr. Williams that I saw Xs on my way to campus, remarking, “So, there is [sic] plenty of reminders [of Katrina].” She replied,

“Oh, yeah definitely. You ride through here and you still see ‘9/10’ and whether it was Texas

Authority or Arkansas Authority. And we’re talking—what, 2017?”20 The X can be found on more than just abandoned structures; some communities embrace the mark. For example, when I spoke with Marc A. Barnes, Dillard’s Vice President for Institutional Advancement and chair of the K10 committee, he told me that his son attends a school where the Katrina X

108 is actually framed.21 Other households have decorated the X, refused to paint over it, or saved the piece of siding as a memory of the storm.

The Katrina X is not unique. It is merely one of the more ominous reminders of the

2005 levee failures in contemporary New Orleans. For those who still live in the city and have struggled to help their communities recover, other, less obvious, reminders can be read on the landscape. As Michel de Certeau observes in “Walking in the City,” “fragmented strata” created by a “series of displacements and effects” are the very fabric of urban space and are not necessarily the result of communal or personal disaster. “It is striking here that the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences,” writes Certeau. “What can be seen designates what is no longer there: ‘you see, here there used to be…,’ but it can no longer be seen.”22 Certeau’s point reminds me of countless conversations I had with neighbors in New Orleans about where people used to live and stores that used to operate nearby.

Trauma accentuates the ghosts that once were in cities. Pasts are drawn to the foreground as the new present recedes to a background that, at times, feels none-too-real in comparison. As archaeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy observes of New Orleans, “The past is, of course, populated by the dead. By specters. They have a reality that secular society attempts to deny.”23 According to Dawdy, and as I have witnessed myself, the spectral dead are made manifest by the material landscape of the city and in the antique items preserved and circulated amongst the living. The nearness of bygone traumas, especially outsized ones like

Hurricane Katrina, can certainly be felt along Dillard’s Avenue of the Oaks, as will be explored below.

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Traumas can force an uncanny shift in perspective that presents the present as always emerging from and defined by a singular painful moment rather than an outgrowth of a broader swath of historical forces and agentive actors. “The possibility of a memory of trauma, of an unbroken account of its history,” writes sociologist Jackie Orr, “disappears in the hypnotic-suggestive knots that tie trauma to an interminable, repetitious present tense.”24

Critical theorist Lauren Berlant describes the temporality of trauma as an “impasse” that is

“decompositional—in the unbound temporality of the stretch of time, it marks a delay that demands activity.”25 An impasse, as Berlant further elucidates, is brought about by a dramatic event where “the historical present—a thick moment of ongoingness, a situation that can absorb many genres without having one itself—is a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape.”26 Hurricane Katrina created such an impasse at Dillard.

In New Orleans, the ongoing present tense of Katrina—Katrina as impasse—takes the shape of the empty lots where homes were demolished and not rebuilt, schools and businesses that remain shuttered, uprooted trees that leave behind plain grassy patches, cement stairs that climb three steps to a porch that no longer exists, and the neighbors that never came back (see Figure 3.1).27 New Orleanians developed capacities for recognizing these and other less visible Katrina scars. Even in seemingly rebuilt neighborhoods, Dr.

Figure 3.1. Bullet hole painting with blood dripping into the Katrina “X.” Behind the house are cement steps leading to a backdoor that no longer exists. Photo of the front of the house taken by author in October 2014. Photo of the steps behind the house taken by author in August 2015.

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Williams told me, “you can still see the remnants of the storm.”28 In her parents’ neighborhood, for example, she recently came across a rebuilt house with a well-manicured lawn that she discovered was abandoned. “They keep the grass cut. But you can tell. I always—it’s funny, what I do is when I’m riding, especially in the area, I check to see if I see an electric meter. Because if there’s no electric meter the house is abandoned.”29 These trained habits of reading the city are certainly not unique to New Orleans’ residents. What is unique is the heightened sensitivity to certain scars and absences along the landscape and interpreting their meaning through the lens of a specific shared traumatic experience.

As the reading of absences for evidence of Katrina demonstrates, traumas do more than scar the physical landscape, they also leave indelible marks on the psyche of a community. On February 7, 2017, an EF-3 tornado touched down in New Orleans East just a few miles from Dillard’s campus. I found a television in the safety of City Hall. On the screen, a reporter stood amongst the wreckage of snapped telephone poles and an overturned semi-truck. He described the tornado as a “sucker-punch” to a neighborhood still trying to recover from the damage wrought by Katrina almost twelve years ago.30 For this reporter, the most efficient way of describing the impact of the tornado to a New Orleanian audience was to frame it in relation to Hurricane Katrina.

A few hours later, I met with Marc Barnes in his office in Rosenwald Hall, one of the original buildings on campus that sustained significant flood damage in 2005. During our conversation about Dillard’s mock jazz funeral, the topic of the tornado inevitably came up.

“I mean, for us,” Barnes said about Hurricane Katrina, “that’s our point of reference.”31 Of course the reporter described the tornado in relation to the 2005 flood, explained Barnes. “In

New Orleans now, we reference things as pre-Katrina and post-Katrina…. You know, it’s

111 like…B.C. and A.D. for us. It’s post-Katrina and pre-Katrina.”32 Dr. Williams made similar observations a week before the tornado touched down in New Orleans East.

And really when you look at it, you always—even now, I say pre-Katrina, post-

Katrina—I mean it was a change in just the way things were done, who was here,

who’s not here. And I guess, for a person like myself who’s been in New Orleans for

most of their lives, I can look at things and say, “Oh, wow, that’s not here anymore.

Oh, that’s gone away. This is what has happened. This is why we don’t do this.”33

In short, Katrina radically altered New Orleanians’ perception of time, place, community, and trauma.

In August 2015, despite moving a decade beyond the storm, enjoying surging admission numbers, and rebuilding the entire campus and upgrading most of the buildings, officials at Dillard believed their university was still anchored to memories of Katrina. More than an intangible feeling, the campus materialized the impasse; no space more so than the

Avenue of the Oaks. Trees lost in the storm scarred this sacred portion of Dillard, visually reminding the campus community of the pain and loss created by the breached levees. As the next section of this chapter will demonstrate, the trees that form the Avenue of the Oaks are more than mere ornamental symbols of the university; instead, they are living witnesses that carry memories of their own. Because of the oaks’ active role as participants in Dillard’s most important traditions, the Avenue of the Oaks needed to be re-consecrated after the traumas endured since 2005. The tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall proved an opportune moment for such a ceremonial re-consecration to take place.

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“Gleaming White and Spacious Green”34

To better understand the rhetorical significance of the Avenue of the Oaks, a brief account of the general importance of trees—and live oaks in particular—in post-Katrina New

Orleans must be given. One of New Orleans’ most remarkable features is its trees. Radio producer, writer, and documentarian Eve Abrams describes New Orleans’ live oaks as “the grand cultural and ecological icons of the south.”35 Indeed, the Spanish moss that beards cypresses and live oaks has captured the imagination of a multitude of writers, including

Mark Twain, Lafcadio Hearn, and George Washington Cable.36 Taken together, the published attention given to New Orleans’ trees makes references to cypresses and live oaks a kind of literary shorthand that allows authors to quickly locate their stories in southern

Louisiana. Of course, the literary popularity of New Orleans’ trees has wreathed them with a primeval timelessness that affects how New Orleanians interact with their arboreal environment. As Dawdy observes, New Orleanians talk about trees in deeply personal terms, mourning them when they are lost. “There is something about the longevity of trees on the landscape as witnesses (and sometimes victims) to events over and beyond the human life span,” explains Dawdy.37

Oaks in New Orleans, and elsewhere, are living memorials that are difficult to uproot.

The longevity of these trees combined with their significance as places of public gathering and their ability to record local experiences through growth rings makes them important material archives for the communities that surround them. “Trees have long been inscribed with meanings of life and vitality,” writes rhetorician Jenny Rice. “Tree removal, by comparison, is weighted down with the heavy signification of death, murder, and decay.”38

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More than the loss of a beloved landmark, the death of a live oak represents the loss of a material archive of memory.

For instance, fearing a profound erasure of collective memory after the poisoning of the Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas in the late-1980s, Rice explains that, “In the months following the terrible incident, people left thousands of letters, cards, notes, pictures, and other personal mementos at the base of Treaty Oak…. They were personal and intimate.

Some even referenced inside memories between the writers and the tree.”39 Outpourings of love, support, and sympathy for a dead or dying live oak are far from anomalous. The 2010 poisoning of live oaks in Toomer’s Corner on the campus of Auburn University in eastern

Alabama evoked a response similar to Austin’s. Traditionally, following football victories,

Auburn’s students surround the oaks, festooning them with countless rolls of toilet paper. In the aftermath of their poisoning, mourners left signs and notes beside police barricades erected around the oaks expressing condolences and grief over the dying trees. A few days before the removal of the oaks in 2013, ESPN reported that, “tens of thousands of Auburn fans gathered for one final celebratory rolling following the spring game.”40

In both cases, local authorities attempted to extend the memorial reach of the oaks beyond their natural life by transforming bits and pieces of the public landmarks into private trinkets for sale. “After arborists pruned limbs of the tree,” recounts Rice, “the city [of

Austin] began to sell relics carved from its wood. Residents bought pencils, furniture, bowls, vases, and small coins all made from the dead branches of their beloved oak.”41 Auburn

University made similar arrangements, selling framed pieces of bark and vials holding twigs.42 Taking matters a step further, Auburn’s Department of Horticulture currently grows and sells clones of the Auburn Oaks for $125 and “Original Auburn Toomer’s Oaks

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Seedlings” standing between eight and twelve feet tall for $1,500.43 As these public reactions to dying trees attest, the loss of live oaks invites communities to mourn the death of a living memorial—a loss made all the more painful by cultural expectations that these venerable trees will outlive any one person’s life.44

After the 2005 floods, New Orleans’ trees, like the poisoned oaks in Austin and

Auburn, took on added significance. Nostalgia clung closely to dying trees as well as the trees that endured the flood and survived.45 Following Hurricane Katrina, Dillard

University’s community expressed its collective dismay over the loss of trees along the famed Avenue of the Oaks, but in a manner different than Austin or Auburn. Rather than parceling out pieces of the dead oaks for private consumption, Dillard channeled feelings of communal loss along the Avenue of the Oaks into a celebration of communal endurance. In

Dawdy’s words, mourning the loss of New Orleans’ trees, “offers an opportunity to savor and reassert the spirit of place.”46 Dillard, through the memorial event “Jazz Funeral:

Burying the Past,” reconsecrated public memories lived out in the material archive of

Dillard’s famed arboreal lane.

In 1930, Dillard University formed with the merger of Straight College and New

Orleans University. Both founded in 1869, Dillard’s parent institutions were “established to educate newly freed blacks.”47 Following a period of disagreement amongst New Orleanian philanthropists and educators over who should lead the new institution, Will W. Alexander,

“a white Southern preacher,” became Dillard’s first president.48 Less than a year later, in

1936, Dr. William Stuart Nelson replaced Alexander. After serving five years as the first black president of Shaw College in Raleigh, North Carolina, Nelson earned the same distinction at Dillard.49 Nelson took charge shortly after the university built a new campus

115 beside the London Avenue Canal in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans—the current site of Dillard University.

Shortly after arriving on campus, Nelson penned Dillard’s alma mater, a song still taught to incoming first-year students during weekly chapel services.50 In the first verse of

“Fair Dillard,” Nelson praised the college’s landscaped beauty, writing,

Fair Dillard,

Gleaming white and spacious green,

We love thy every blade and tree;

We love thy breathless days, thy night serene,

Thy halls where men are men and free.

Arise, O sons and daughters, hail thy queen.

And pledge for aye thy loyalty.

Nelson drew inspiration from the campus lawns shaded by the newly planted live oaks arranged in a stately “450-foot-long parallel row” by prominent New Orleanian architect

Moise H. Goldstein, Sr.51 In her essay on New Orleans’ oaks, Abrams quotes landscape architect Skip Treme, who argues that, “When you plant a line of live oaks on a street, it’s the future you’re thinking of.”52 Both Goldstein and Nelson were no doubt looking toward the future of Dillard when the live oaks were planted in the mid-1930s. More than complementing the five original buildings that Goldstein designed in a Beaux Arts style, the maturing Avenue of the Oaks visually signals that Dillard is a prestigious institution of higher learning in the South.53

The Avenue of the Oaks lends a regal grandeur to the gated campus, serving as a gathering point and visually anchoring current generations of students to the college’s

116 traditions. Every year, graduating students process down the Avenue of the Oaks during commencement. Over time, the aging oaks assumed a venerated position on the landscape not only because of their physical centrality, but because of the repeated enactments of academic rituals held beneath their picturesque boughs. Despite their relative youth, the oaks add an ancient quality to rituals held on the mid-twentieth century landscape.54 As Abrams observes of live oaks, “It can take twenty to thirty years before they develop a canopy. Yet once established, these grand trees feel timeless—omnipresent witnesses to generations of human lives.”55 On Dillard’s campus, the oaks act as revered witnesses that ground traditions in a perceptually stable landscape even as they mark the creeping passage of time through their growth. The age and expansion of the oaks—both above and below ground— concomitantly index Dillard’s prestige. One journalist wrote that, “In flights of fancy, some

[alumni] will say they have felt the arms of those giant oaks reach down and embrace them.”56 Today, the accumulated honor bestowed on the oaks by the Dillard community matches the adulation first intoned in Nelson’s verses.

In our conversation about the event “Jazz Funeral: Burying the Past,” Rev. Salsberry helped explain the comforting presence of the row of trees, stating that, “The Avenue of the

Oaks is a sacred place” (see Figure 3.2).57 He went on to say that “the oaks represent strength, and accomplishment, and success” along with other values associated with graduation and “commemorating a milestone in a young person’s life.”58 When I shared Rev.

Salsberry’s observations with Marc Barnes, Barnes agreed with the chaplain, saying that the oak trees are “very symbolic of the campus.” Barnes continued, referencing the opening lines of “Fair Dillard,” “I don’t know if he told you about ‘the gleaming white and spacious green.’ But that’s what we call campus. And so, the oak trees are very much a part of that,

117 part of the landscape, but also symbolically part of what this institution is.”59 According to both Barnes and Rev. Salsberry, the Avenue of the Oaks is not merely an idyllic part of

Dillard’s pastoral landscape; instead, the iconic oaks are inextricably linked with the history, tradition, and values of Dillard University itself. Because of the historic nature of the campus, especially the original buildings and the Avenue of the Oaks, the Department of the

Interior added Dillard to the National Registry of Historic Places in 2003.60

Figure 3.2. Dillard University’s Avenue of the Oaks. Photo taken by author on August 28, 2015.

Three years after receiving the historic designation from the Department of the

Interior and six months after the 2005 levee failures, The Black Collegian, a national career and self-development periodical tailored toward the needs of black college students, interviewed President Hughes. In the midst of uncertain enrollment numbers and ambiguous construction timelines, the periodical’s editorial staff asked, “What is the most common concern you have heard from students and parents?” President Hughes replied,

Students are [interested in] returning to their home campus on Gentilly Boulevard and

graduating under the Avenue of the Oaks. This is a splendid tradition and one the

students look forward to each year. Housing was a big concern, but we have been

able to accommodate students at the Hilton Hotel.61

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Remarkably, half a year after the levees failed, with every building on campus in need of repair, half the student population displaced, and faculty and staff still uncertain about their ability to find permanent living accommodations, the most common concern amongst students was returning to the Avenue of the Oaks.

The students’ concern was warranted. Even though all but a few of the oaks survived the storm surge and high winds of the hurricane, many feared that Katrina’s “toxic stew”— filled with “raw sewage, bacteria, heavy metals, pesticides and toxic chemicals”—would fell the remaining oaks.62 Indeed, three weeks of standing brackish water left behind a thick, dark sludge that killed most vegetation on campus and defoliated the oaks. The fact that almost all of the oaks remained standing after the floodwaters subsided was little comfort to the Dillard community. Barnes recounts his own anxiety about the longevity of the oaks, saying, “we were told by the horticulturalists after the storm that it would be some years before we knew whether those trees would really survive. And, fortunately, most of them did survive, but we subsequently lost two more.”63 The loss of even a few oaks was dispiriting. In our conversation, Rev. Salsberry pointed out that the Avenue of the Oaks “is a traditional space that we like to always utilize when we do events because the Oaks is a sacred place. We do graduations there. The oaks, we believe the oaks talk, in a sense.”64

The ability of live oaks to speak has popular literary antecedents in Louisiana. In a famous passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, the eponymous heroine weeps for her lost lover beneath a Louisiana oak. As she cries, the oaks around her speak.

“‘Patience!’ whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of darkness; // And from the moonlit meadow a sigh responded, ‘To-morrow!’”65 Alas, Evangeline does not have the ears to hear the wisdom of the mighty trees. Like Evangeline’s oak, the Avenue of the Oaks on Dillard’s

119 campus witness events that unfold beneath their boughs and offer guidance to those willing to listen to their whispered words. Because of their important status as witnesses on campus, even in the midst of unprecedented calamity, holding a commencement ceremony away from the Avenue of the Oaks was all but unthinkable at Dillard. As Rev. Salsberry points out, the oaks are part of the community. The perceived loquaciousness of the trees demonstrates that the oaks are something more than mute bystanders. Instead, members of Dillard’s community tend to figure the oaks, as Longfellow did, as active participants in living traditions.

Lest I misunderstand the significance of the oaks, Dr. Williams reminded me in our conversation that, “This is a university steeped in tradition.”66 Those traditions must be enacted at their proper time in their proper place; the first commencement after Katrina proves as much. In July of 2006—ten months after the levees breached—the “grass hadn’t come back” under the oaks. In fact, in order to maintain Nelson’s pastoral vision of the

“gleaming white and spacious green,” Dr. Williams explained that crews spray painted the ground along the Avenue of the Oaks “to make it look green.”67 In spite of the faux-green lawns, on July 1, 2006, against improbable odds, 347 Dillard seniors graduated under the

Avenue of the Oaks.68 One member of the class of 2006 was Rev. Earnest Salsberry.

Reflecting on the commencements he has attended at Dillard, Rev. Salsberry reiterated, “the oaks are very sacred to us.”69

Of course, Dillard planted new oaks to replace the ones killed by the flood. Students named the first replacement oak Katrina. However, the class of 2006 renamed the oak, calling it the “Marvalene Tree,” instead. A small plaque beneath the tree briefly details the circumstances that led to its planting and explains the name change as a tribute to the

“exceptional leadership” demonstrated by President Marvalene Hughes in the aftermath of

120 the storm.70 The very youth and lack of stature of these young trees, compared to their hoary elders, carried the trauma of the floods into the ever-unfolding present. Looking at the

Avenue of the Oaks, the scars left by Hurricane Katrina are still visible, even to the untrained eye. Dillard’s administration wanted to find a way to position memories of the 2005 floods out of the ongoing present. In Barnes’ words, “we didn’t want Katrina to continuously be part of our everyday vernacular.”71 In order to uproot traumatic memories of the storm mired in the present, something had to be done about the fledgling oaks that served as perpetual reminders of an unhealed collective wound. In 2015, the day before ten years after Hurricane

Katrina’s landfall, Dillard held the event “Jazz Funeral: Burying the Past” as a way to re- consecrate the tradition and history of their most sacred landscape. The following section will analyze the ceremonial mock jazz funeral that passed beneath the Avenue of the Oaks.

Burying Katrina

On August 28, 2015, the Times-Picayune devoted their entire front page to thirteen reproductions of their own cover pages from ten years earlier. In all-caps, the largest headlines read, “KATRINA TAKES AIM,” “CATASTROPHIC,” and “‘HELP US,

PLEASE.’” Surrounded by these headlines, in an understated italicized script that barely crept above the fold, the 2015 newspaper recounted, “On Sunday morning, August 28, 2005,

New Orleans issued its first-ever mandatory evacuation. By then, most people in the area had left.” All week, the Times-Picayune filled its columns with ten-year retrospectives on

Hurricane Katrina. The Times-Picayune was far from the only media outlet adopting such an approach. Many of the New Orleanians I spoke with—cab drivers, waitresses, bookshop keepers, and bartenders—admitted that they were exhausted by the repetitive retelling of

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Katrina stories. But as the fateful date of August 29th approached, Katrina coverage only intensified.

Unlike ten years earlier, August 28, 2015 arrived as a fairly mild day by New

Orleans’ summer standards. The temperature hovered around 80° Fahrenheit at 10:30 a.m. and I noted that the weather felt only “slightly humid” under a clear, blue sky.72 Unlike 2005, the sky bore no signs of an impending hurricane, only the occasional wisps of white clouds.

As people gathered by the entrance to Lawless Chapel, faculty and staff handed out royal blue handkerchiefs with Dillard’s crest emblazoned on one side in white (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3. Handkerchief from the jazz funeral and Medard H. Nelson Charter School Brass Band underneath flagpole. Oak trees that make up the end of the Avenue of the Oaks are in the background. Photos taken by author on August 28, 2015.

The crest bears the simple inscription “Dillard University Louisiana” along with Dillard’s motto, “Ex Fide Fortis”—Strength from Faith—above the depiction of an anchor whose stock is converted into an evenly balanced set of scales. On the handkerchief, centered beneath the crest in a serif font, are the words, “Katrina 10 // Commemoration // August 26-

30, 2015.”

Handkerchiefs are staples of New Orleans’ second line culture, connected as they are with Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs’ annual parades, popular wedding ceremonies, Louis

Armstrong, and the earliest accounts of African and Caribbean polyrhythms mixing in Congo

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Square.73 When I was offered a blue handkerchief outside of Lawless Chapel, I eagerly accepted it as a second lining dance prop, a memento to remember the commemorative occasion, and a more dignified means of mopping my brow. After receiving my handkerchief, I, along with several others, retreated under the shade of a nearby live oak to avoid the increasing heat of southern Louisiana’s subtropical sun and wait for the mock jazz funeral to begin. In addition to Dillard faculty, staff, and students gathering for the jazz funeral, several groups of outsiders were also present. I met a group from Rochester, New

York, volunteering with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. I also saw college students from the Rising Tide Conference who were let out early to attend the event.74 Many of the people gathered outside Lawless Chapel carried professional recording equipment, including video cameras, cameras, and audio recording devices. I spied press credentials from ABC and Fox

Radio in addition to Dillard students working for the university news.75 The journalists and volunteers were mostly white while those associated with Dillard and the Rising Tide

Conference were mostly people of color. Two years later, when I asked Marc Barnes what it was like to have so many outsiders present for the jazz funeral, he replied, “it was great.” He then explained that Dillard’s current administration “has been very intentional about bringing the community onto campus.” And that holding events, like this one, helped “symbolically get rid of the wall between us and the community.”76 In keeping with jazz funeral traditions, second liners were welcomed to participate even if, like me, their previous associations with

Dillard were tenuous at best.

In quintessential New Orleans brass band fashion, the Medard H. Nelson Charter

School brass band showed up a few minutes late. Rev. Salsberry took a moment to tell the waiting crowd that the event would start shortly after 11:00 a.m, which it did.77 Once the

123 brass band arrived the ceremony began. Rev. Salsberry ascended the three sidewalk steps leading to the chapel’s entrance to open the event. Apologizing for not having a microphone,

Rev. Salsberry used his resonant voice—which he honed while earning a B.A. in vocal performance and music at Dillard—so that he was easily heard by the entire assembly.78 He then observed that the lack of amplification was in keeping with New Orleans’ parading traditions where music played by the band is accented by improvised noises from your mouths, beer cans, and whatever else is readily available.79 Rev. Salsberry then introduced

Dr. Eartha Johnson, a member of the K10 committee, who delivered a prepared address on the significance of marking ten years after the floods at Dillard. Dr. Johnson, in turn, introduced Dr. Mary Green who read a stirring poem she wrote specially for the occasion.

Finally, Aaron Mair, president of the Sierra Club, spoke in a booming bass voice. Drawing well-founded connections between Louisiana’s depleted wetlands and the cataclysmic flooding of New Orleans in 2005, Mair urged Dillard students to keep up the political struggle for environmental justice both in New Orleans and in the halls of Congress. Mair reminded those gathered about the disparity in federal reactions to Hurricane Katrina on the

Gulf Coast and Hurricane Sandy in the Mid-Atlantic. By way of conclusion, Mair told the audience that the commemoration planned by Dillard was altogether fitting because “second lines are about memorials and about memory.”80 With that, the first round of speeches concluded, and the Medard H. Nelson brass band struck up the jazz funeral dirge

“Gloryland” unenthusiastically and with a great deal of hesitation.

After a false start, the sousaphone-playing band leader got the entire band on the same page and then, with his free hand, pushed the reluctant trombone player forward to begin the jazz funeral procession.81 The brass band was made up of six middle schoolers and

124 their band instructor on sousaphone. The three boys in the band played the snare drum, bass drum, and trombone while two girls played the trumpet and saxophone. Even though it is now common for brass bands playing second lines and mock jazz funerals to wear t-shirts and jeans, the Medard H. Nelson band showed up in traditional attire. That is, they wore white long-sleeved shirts—the saxophonist had on a short-sleeved white polo shirt—black slacks, and black shoes. The only articles of clothing missing from the traditional style were black ties and band caps with the band’s name on the side band.

Looking at the youthful musicians, I was sure that the choice of a middle school band was made for symbolic reasons by the K10 committee. After all, New Orleans has plenty of active brass bands that perform jazz funerals and second lines and many of these professional musicians live just down St. Bernard Avenue in the nearby Seventh Ward. But when I asked members of the K10 committee, all insisted that the band was chosen because of the charter school’s close proximity to Dillard’s campus.82 As Barnes put it, “It really wasn’t symbolic of anything, honestly.”83 Skeptical of this response, and fishing for some grander intention, I argued, “Yeah. Even so, there’s something rich about, you know, the young…—Barnes:

Absolutely—…voices leading us through.”84 Barnes agreed, adding that because this particular band was very young at the time of Hurricane Katrina, it gave the kids a chance to take “part in something that they otherwise may not have understood.”85

Following the opening dirge, the brass band played joyful, upbeat music for the remainder of the mock jazz funeral. In fact, the rest of their musical selections—“Ho Na

Nae,” “We’ve Got that Fire,” and “Let’s Go Get ’Em”—are Mardi Gras Indian standards that have been popularized for second line parades by street bands like the Rebirth Brass Band.

As the Medard H. Nelson brass band approached the Avenue of the Oaks they “cut the body

125 loose,” figuratively speaking, by transitioning from songs of mourning to songs of joy. A few second liners—mostly Dillard faculty and staff—were ready to dance and sing along in the late-morning heat. However, the majority of out-of-town attendees seemed decidedly uncomfortable with the prospect of dancing in public. In my fieldnotes I wrote, “there really was hardly any dancing.”86 Knowing what was expected at a second line, I danced along to the New Orleans street cadence to the best of my ability as I had done at other second lines. I stopped, briefly to take pictures and video snippets of the procession moving along the

Avenue of the Oaks, passing the Marvalene Tree, and stopping under the flagpole where the

U.S. flag hung at half-mast (see Figure 3.2).

After a brief trumpet solo, the band concluded “Ho Na Nae” while the second line stragglers caught up to the band. Then the sousaphonist played the opening lick of “We’ve

Got that Fire,” but was cut off by Rev. Salsberry who spoke a few words before offering a prayer that he invited all present to meditate on regardless of faith and background.87 The day had gotten decidedly hotter by this time, and coolers of water along with paper cups were placed near the flagpole for second liners to hydrate. When Rev. Salsberry concluded the prayer, the band started “We’ve Got that Fire,” which they played with greater confidence than the previous two songs.

From the flagpole, the band led the mock jazz funeral procession around the Kearny

Building to the courtyard where Dr. Williams recalled “looking out at the sea of freshman students” in 2005.88 By this time, the crowd had thinned somewhat, even though the band was hitting their groove. A number of faculty clapped and sang along as the youthful brass band chanted rhythmically, “We’ve got that fiiire! We’ve got that fiiire!” After a trombone

126 solo from the musician who had to be pushed to start the procession, the band ended their song. But the mock funeral was not yet over.

Behind the Kearny Building, Rev. Salsberry introduced Kevin Bastian who spoke about the relationship between commemoration and forgiveness. During his speech, Bastian explained that doves are symbolic of forgiveness in the Christian faith. As he spoke he cited several passages concerning forgiveness from the New Testament including Matthew 6,89

Colossians 3:13,90 and Ephesians 4:31-32.91 As Bastian admonished the crowd, commemorations of painful events, like Hurricane Katrina, only provide the conditions of collective healing when forgiveness is included. After Bastian’s remarks, Rev. Salsberry, with a little bit of help, opened a basket containing three doves mentioning that he was not sure what was going to happen. After some coaxing, three doves burst out of the basket and flew in the direction of the London Avenue Canal that breached ten years earlier inundating the campus. As the birds flew away, a woman beside me remarked in a hushed voice that the doves were symbolic of the Trinity.92 Dr. Johnson then said a few words in closing before inviting Marc Barnes to have the final word. Though he was unprepared, Barnes delivered an impromptu speech explaining that this was a moment to “commemorate, reflect, and thank

God.”93 He told the gathered second liners that he stood in the same spot ten years earlier and the devastation was unimaginable. Looking out at the crowd, Barnes explained that to “stand here now is truly amazing.”94 Then, by way of closing, Barnes encouraged those gathered to work toward where they will be in ten years. He then invited the K10 committee to stand with him so that their hard work preparing the jazz funeral for Katrina could be acknowledged. Rev. Salsberry dismissed everyone to the food court located in the Kearny

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Building while the band rolled into the Mardi Gras Indian standard “Let’s Go Get ’Em” as the crowd dispersed. The entire event lasted approximately one hour, ending at 12:15 p.m.

“Getting Past the Katrina Story”95

As I stood under the oaks beside Lawless Chapel before the jazz funeral for Katrina, and wandered behind the Kearny Building after the procession, I asked several people why

Dillard decided to hold a jazz funeral—as opposed to some other commemorative event—on the tenth anniversary of Katrina. I was consistently told some variation of, “we wanted to do something distinctly New Orleans.”96 In early-2017, when I returned to Dillard to speak with members of the K10 committee, I received similar answers. Marc Barnes explained,

We wanted to be thinking bigger now about where Dillard University is going. So, we

had to figure out, you know, how do we put Katrina to bed, in a sense. And, so we

thought about doing a jazz funeral because in New Orleans that’s how we bury

things; we bury things with a jazz funeral.97

Using similar language, Dr. Williams replied that, “I think the jazz funeral was significant because that’s how we celebrate in New Orleans—good and bad.”98 While jazz funerals are certainly an integral part of New Orleans’ self-styled history and identity, more was at work in the K10 committee’s selection of this particular funerary tradition.

In each conversation I had with members of the K10 committee, the jazz funeral for

Katrina was described as a memorial mechanism that could help the Dillard community turn attention away from the trauma of the past and focus instead on Dillard’s growth since 2005 and the university’s future. In fact, Rev. Salsberry told me that, as an institution “we’ve agreed that we won’t have any more commemorations because we want to move forward.”

He continued, saying, “We don’t want to have to relive trauma.”99 Dr. Williams worded it

128 slightly differently, suggesting, “I think we were celebrating more that we’ve come such a long way from where we were and it’s time to try to put this incident to rest. Let’s bury it.

Let’s celebrate it. But we’re moving on again.”100 Moving on again required a ritualized remaking of Dillard’s once-flooded campus. As Barnes acknowledged, “the administration knew that we had to do some kind of commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Katrina.”101

Reorienting the community’s perspective of Katrina could have been accomplished in a variety of ways, including the construction of a physical memorial. However, in light of the enduring reminders of Katrina’s destruction throughout Gentilly, most notably represented on Dillard’s campus by the newly planted trees along the Avenue of the Oaks, a commemorative structure would not have worked for a number of reasons. First, by its nature a memorial draws attention back to a moment—in this case, an initial trauma that Dillard has spent millions of dollars trying to overcome. The presence of a memorial, then, would likely continue the mediated narrative that Katrina was the defining moment in Dillard’s history.

Second, memorials are not as powerfully resonant as jazz funerals and oak trees at Dillard.

Therefore, a memorial would not be the most fitting way for Dillard to mark the passage of ten years after Katrina. Third, a memorial would alter the traditional landscape of Dillard; a change that both the Dillard administration and alumni sought to avoid. Barnes explained the reconstruction goals of the university in this way,

We have a lot of alumni who were students at that time [2005], who were graduating

around that time, and then we have a lot of older alumni who remember Dillard as a

certain thing. And we had to be very careful about when we were reconstructing this

place that we kept the integrity of what the university has traditionally been. So, yeah,

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we want nice and new and pretty, but we also want to keep Dillard University what

Dillard University has always been.102

Fourth, a memorial would not have included Dillard’s student body or the broader Gentilly community as participants in the commemoration. This inclusion was a primary concern for the K10 committee. Rev. Salsberry remembers committee members asking, “How do we engage students? How do we add them as a part of the commemoration?”103

Given these constraints, though necessarily fleeting and ephemeral, a mock jazz funeral provided the K10 committee with a local cultural resource that could adequately acknowledge the pain and suffering that accompanied Katrina while re-consecrating the university’s most sacred landscape. Additionally, a mock jazz funeral could directly involve

Dillard’s faculty, staff, students, neighbors, and curious outsiders, all while symbolically transitioning the community to a life lived outside the shadow of Katrina. At a jazz funeral, as anthropologist Helen A. Regis points out, “second liners’ very bodies become living memorials to the dead.”104 A jazz funeral, unlike an unveiling ceremony for a memorial, could more directly include the community as custodians of memory without permanently altering the landscape of the campus. Preserving traditional memories of Dillard’s historic landscape, after all, was an integral part of the ceremony. Reflecting on the legacy of Katrina and its relationship to other traumas, like the tornado that touched down earlier in the day,

Barnes remarked,

I don’t think we need any more physical—honestly, I don’t even know if we need a

whole lot more symbolic [commemorations]. I mean, I think we’ve had a lot of all

that. I think our memories—and then when things like today happen that conjures up

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those things. We didn’t want to leave anything physical because our intention was to

put it behind us.105

A jazz funeral that processed beneath the Avenue of the Oaks made it possible for Dillard to reclaim their sacred campus space from the defining memories of Katrina.

Historically, jazz funeral traditions acknowledge traumatic pasts along with happier memories, weaving both together for the benefit of a community that endures. Bruce Boyd

Raeburn argues that for musicians, and those who gravitated toward brass band music in the aftermath of Katrina,

drawing on the symbolic potency of a century-old continuum of brass-band jazz

performance was a strategic initiative designed to sustain hope—it was a coping

mechanism as well as a mingling of artistic perspectives…. For a population

enervated and dispossessed by disaster, the ability to feel, to get beyond the

numbness, is a powerful antidote to despair.106

Jazz, as a musical genre, helped New Orleanians encounter grief without succumbing to paralysis in the wake of 2005. Though the intensity of Katrina’s trauma may have subsided over ten years, the jazz funeral for Katrina at Dillard was designed in part to sooth the collective wounds of a community, and transition those present from a focus on death to a celebration of life. In language similar to Raeburn’s, Rev. Salsberry offered the following observation of jazz funeral traditions: “New Orleans has a unique way of memorializing death and trauma. And I think it’s a way…it’s a coping mechanism for them. Which is very helpful, I think, because that means that you’re not disconnected from the reality of what happened.”107 In other words, the event “Jazz Funeral: Burying the Past” was not an institutional initiative simply designed to “bury” traumatic memories; rather, it was a

131 commemorative ritual that allowed the Dillard community to productively encounter the enduring legacies of the storm without overshadowing the university’s future.

As is customary with jazz funerals, the route taken during the jazz funeral for Katrina was an important symbolic resource. As Barnes explained, the route “was all very intentional.” He added that the K10 committee, “talked about going out on Gentilly

Boulevard and doing something, you know, leaving the campus. We said, ‘No. This is

Dillard.’”108 Instead of processing off campus, the K10 committee invited the Gentilly neighborhood, and the broader New Orleans community, to Dillard. The jazz funeral began at Lawless Chapel to link the procession with a commencement ceremony held beforehand, but also because Lawless Chapel was the only building on campus that did not sustain significant flood damage in 2005.109 From the chapel, Barnes said,

We had to go to the Avenue of the Oaks…. And, typically, people can’t walk, play,

anything on that. And commencement is really the only other event that we have in

the Avenue of the Oaks. So, we save that space for very, you know, very solemn,

very serious kinds of occasions. We felt like this was one of those.110

More than an ornamental row of trees, as I argued above, the Avenue of the Oaks are active participants in Dillard’s traditional ceremonies. As witnesses that touch and even speak to the Dillard community, the oaks absorb and retain memories. The live oaks are not merely imbued with memorial significance by the human communities that surround them; the trees, as living organisms, are material archives that produce memories of their own.

Quite literally, the oaks experienced a material impasse in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in much the same way that Dillard experienced a traumatic impasse. “Tree rings are valuable as archives of environmental events and indicators of sustainability,” writes dendrochronologist

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Grant L. Harley.111 After hurricanes, some traumatized trees do not grow new tree rings for years after the storm. Such was the case in Louisiana after Katrina. Dendrochronologists studying trees on the Gulf of Mexico’s barrier islands outside of Louisiana and Mississippi found that the radial growth in slash-pines remained suppressed from 2006 to 2010.112

Dillard’s surviving oaks likely experienced similar stunted growth patterns that physically index a delayed ability to move on from the initial trauma of the storm.

In order to achieve symbolic closure, Dillard had to include the stunted oaks in the commemorative events held on campus ten years after Katrina. Regis argues that jazz funerals are, “public memorial gestures [that] produce a space for the articulation of local subjectivities.” These commemorative gestures “create a collective space for reflection on the structures that impinge on inner-city lives.”113 In Dillard’s case, a jazz funeral re-consecrated the Avenue of the Oaks as a sacred space not primarily scarred by Katrina, but as a growing landscape of traditions past and traditions yet to come.

Of course, as much as members of the K10 committee insisted that the event “Jazz

Funeral: Burying the Past” was indeed about burying the past, each recognized the futility of forgetting Katrina. In fact, in our conversations it became clear that entombing Katrina was never really the goal. “We’re moving on as much as we can,” said Dr. Williams. “But, as you said, in New Orleans, nothing really is buried because it floats to the top. But it was a significance of trying to become fresh again and close the door.”114 She continued,

And, of course, we rehash it easily because when you look around the Avenue of the

Oaks, you see the new trees that have been planted. The new trees have been planted

because those are oak trees we lost. There are about three or four new trees that are

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planted on the Avenue of the Oaks and that’s symbolic because they replaced some of

the ones we lost.115

Felled live oaks represented more than the loss of a beautiful tree. Each live oak that died following Katrina removed approximately 70 years of witnessed history from Dillard’s campus.

In the end, the K10 committee wanted to provide the Dillard community with the symbolic resources they needed to move on. As Rev. Salsberry put it, “how can we add several different elements within our programing that will allow people to memorialize in their own way? We just provide the symbols and they make the connection.”116 In many ways, the jazz funeral seems to have worked. Looking out his office window toward the

Marvalene Tree, Barnes remarked, “I look at that one—particularly that one now that’s been there for about ten years to see how much progress it has made. It’s amazing to look at it.”117

The newly planted trees along the Avenue of the Oaks may still remind viewers of the 2005 floods, but they also represent, as Barnes indicated, the strength and new growth of Dillard

University. More than symbolic, the trees that weathered Katrina at Dillard are material archives that catalogue both pre- and post-Katrina memories. In tree rings, the trunks of each live oak contain a record of the university’s stunted growth and gradual recovery from the

2005 floods. The Avenue of the Oaks whisper these memories to those willing to listen.

1 The word “resilient” has drawn criticism from New Orleans advocates. For instance, during the tenth anniversary of Katrina, I read a flyer taped to a door on St. Bernard Ave. The flyer bore a statement from Tracie L. Washington, who is an attorney for the Louisiana

Justice Institute and a professor at Dillard University. Washington eloquently identifies the danger of rhetorics of resilience, exclaiming, “Stop calling me RESILIENT. Because every

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time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.” Text transcribed from photo taken by the author on August 29, 2015.

2 Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “Faith, Hip-Hop, and Charity: Brass-Band Morphology in

Post-Katrina New Orleans,” in Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective ed. Romain

Huret and Randy J. Sparks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 139.

3 George W. Bush quoted in Billy Sothern, Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a

Drowned City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184.

4 From the Big Apple to the Big Easy: The Concert for New Orleans, (2006; Burbank,

CA: Rhino Entertainment Company), DVD.

5 When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, directed by Spike Lee (2006; Los

Angeles, CA: HBO), DVD.

6 Chris McGreal, “Hurricane Katrina After Five Years: A Symbolic Funeral but

Anger Lives On,” The Guardian (London, UK), Aug. 29, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/29/hurricane-katrina-five-years-on.

7 During our separate recorded conversations, both Rev. Earnest Salsberry and Marc

A. Barnes referred to the Avenue of the Oaks as a “sacred” landscape on Dillard’s campus.

Interview with Rev. Earnest Salsberry, January 25, 2017; Interview with Marc A. Barnes,

February 7, 2017.

8 Interview with Dawn Williams, January 25, 2017.

9 Sharon W. Hutchinson, Charlotte Hurst, Sheila C. Haynes, Betty P. Dennis, and

Sheila J. Webb, “Persevering Through the Storm: Educating Nursing Seniors in the

Aftermath of Katrina,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 18, no. 2

(2007): 249.

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10 Julia Cass, “Amid Katrina’s Ruins, Black Colleges Survive,” Washington Post

January 29, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/01/28/AR2006012800907.html.

11 Williams.

12 “Dillard University’s New President: An Editorial,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans,

LA), November 3, 2011, http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2011/11/dillard_universitys_new_presid.html.

13 Williams.

14 Salsberry.

15 Cass.

16 Cass; Williams.

17 Cass.

18 Williams.

19 Rebecca Solnit, “Nothing was Foreordained,” in Unfathomable City: A New

Orleans Atlas ed. Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2013), 132.

20 Williams.

21 Barnes.

22 Emphasis in original text. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life trans.

Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108.

23 Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archaeology (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2016), 154-55.

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24 Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2006), 21-22.

25 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 199.

26 Berlant, 200.

27 For an exercise in seeing the ghosts of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina landscape, see

Ted Jackson’s interactive digital photo gallery. By dragging your cursor across an image, you can make pictures from New Orleans in 2005 “dissolve” into pictures of the same place in

2014. Ted Jackson, “Swipe the Photos and See Hurricane Katrina Disaster Dissolve into

Present-Day Recovery,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), August 25, 2014, updated

August 29, 2017, http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2014/08/hurricane_katrina_then_and_now.html#incar t_river_index_topics.

28 Williams.

29 Williams.

30 Fieldnotes, “Rosenwald Hall Rm. 230, Dillard University, 3:25 pm, 2/7/2017.”

31 Barnes also said, “Time is referenced by Katrina in many, many ways.”

32 Barnes.

33 Williams.

34 “Fair Dillard // The gleaming white and spacious green” is the opening line of

Dillard University’s alma mater.

35 Eve Abrams, “Sentinels and Celebrants,” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans

Atlas ed. Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2013), 94. Entomologists Julie Ann Dobbs, David W. Held, and T. Evan Nebeker concur

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with Abrams characterization, beginning their post-Katrina paper on live oaks by writing,

“Live oak trees, Quercus virginiana, have long been considered to be the symbol of the Old

South. Part of the attraction of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts is the stately live oaks. These majestic live oaks have weathered many hurricanes in their >200 yr life span.” Julie Ann

Dobbs, David W. Held, and T. Evan Nebeker, “Status of Mississippi Gulf Coast Live Oak

Trees after Hurricane Katrina,” SNA Research Conference 51 (2006): 454.

36 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 314;

Lafcadio Hearn, “Spanish Moss,” in Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn ed.

S. Frederick Starr (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001): 156; George Washington

Cable, The Grandissimes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 9.

37 Dawdy, 99.

38 Jenny Rice, Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis

(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 11.

39 Rice, 9.

40 “Harvey Updyke Finishes Jail Sentence,” ESPN, June 10, 2013, http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/9360611/harvey-updyke-freed-ending- toomer-corner-tree-poisoning-case.

41 Rice, 9.

42 “Toomer’s Oaks Mementos Include Framed Pieces of the Oaks, Sawdust-Encrusted

Key Chains,” The War Eagle Reader, April 25, 2013, https://www.thewareaglereader.com/2013/04/toomers-oaks-mementos-available-for- preorder-on-fanatics-com/.

138

43 “First Generation Auburn Oaks Are Now On Shipping,” Auburn Oaks, accessed

February 28, 2018, http://www.ag.auburn.edu/auburnoaks/.

44 For more on the “living memories of trees” see, David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York: Viking, 2017).

45 Dawdy, 110.

46 Dawdy, 110.

47 F. Erik Brooks and Glenn L. Starks, Historically Black Colleges and Universities:

An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011), 49.

48 Brooks and Starks, 49.

49 Brooks and Starks, 24, 49.

50 “Five Songs Every Dillard Alumnus & Student Should Know,” Dillard University

National Alumni Association, June 19, 2014, https://dualumninews.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/five-songs-every-dillard-alumnus-student- should-know/.

51 Richard H. Ekman, “The CIC Historic Campus Architecture Project,” Planning for

Higher Education 39, no. 3 (2011): 47.

52 Abrams, 97.

53 John Shelton Reed, Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 144; “Rosenwald Hall,” Council of

Independent Colleges Historic Campus Architecture Project, last updated November 2006, accessed January 17, 2018, http://hcap.artstor.org/cgi-bin/library?a=d&d=p537.

54 Editorial histories of Dillard tend to refer to the oaks as if they were primeval. For instance, Eric Hoover describes the Avenue of the Oaks as “the two rows of ancient trees that

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line the heart of the campus.” Eric Hoover, “A Beloved Black University Fights to Survive,”

The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 4 (2005): A21.

55 Abrams, 97.

56 Hoover, A21.

57 Salsberry.

58 Salsberry.

59 Barnes.

60 “National Register of Historic Places,” National Park Service, accessed January 28,

2017, https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail?assetID=65f66dce-83eb-4e8a-a111-

628ba121ba25.

61 Marvalene Hughes as quoted in “Katrina Update: Dillard University,” Black

Collegian 36, no. 2 (2006): 10.

62 Madeleine Brand, “Cleaning Up New Orleans’ Toxic Stew,” NPR, September 7,

2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4836228.

63 Barnes.

64 Salsberry.

65 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline (London: David Bogue, 1801), 69.

66 Williams.

67 Williams.

68 Marvalene Hughes, “Dillard University, Five Years After Katrina,” Washington

Post, August 30, 2010, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college- inc/2010/08/dillard_university_five_years.html.

69 Salsberry.

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70 In my fieldnotes, I observed that “The placque [sic] is also a physical marker— already skewed off its cement plinth on the ground—of the devestating [sic] effects that the failed levees had for this university.” Fieldnotes, “Avenue of the Oaks, Dillard Univ., 12:41 pm 2/1/2017.”

71 Barnes.

72 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral—Field Notes,” August 28, 2015.

73 In Armstrong Park, across the street from the French Quarter, stands a statue of the park’s namesake: Louis Armstrong. The statue depicts Armstrong at ease and grinning. He holds his trumpet in his left hand by his side while his right hand lifts a handkerchief as if he just wiped—or is about to wipe—his face. For the earliest written account of music and dance in Congo Square, see Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New

Orleans: Diary and Sketches 1818-1820 ed. Samuel Wilson, Jr. (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1951), 49. For an example of scholarship that links African, Caribbean, and

American musical and dance traditions through handkerchiefs, see Sybil Kein, “The

Celebration of Life in New Orleans Jazz Funerals,” Revue Franҫaise d’Etudes Américaines

51 (1992): 23.

74 In my fieldnotes, I note that these participants “were very reluctant to dance.”

Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

75 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.” After the jazz funeral, I found an edited news segment produced by RT News—an “English-language news channel which brings the

Russian view on global news”—and posted on YouTube. “USA: Jazz Funeral Honours

Hurricane Katrina Victims 10 Years On,” YouTube posted by Ruptly, Aug. 28, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1vpwmRhNNs.

141

76 Barnes.

77 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

78 “Dillard Appoints Rev. Earnest Salsberry as University Chaplain” Dillard

University, n.d., accessed January 23, 2018, http://www.dillard.edu/_about-dillard/office-of- the-chapel/rev-earnest-salsberry-chaplain.php.

79 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

80 The quotation from Aaron Mair comes from fieldnotes taken during the event and transcribed later on the same day. Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

81 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

82 Salsberry; Barnes; Williams.

83 Barnes.

84 Barnes.

85 Barnes.

86 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

87 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

88 Williams.

89 “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”

90 “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

142

91 “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in

Christ God forgave you.”

92 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

93 This quotation from Marc Barnes comes from fieldnotes taken during the event and transcribed later on the same day. Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

94 This quotation from Marc Barnes comes from fieldnotes taken during the event and transcribed later on the same day. Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

95 Barnes.

96 Fieldnotes, “Dillard Jazz Funeral.”

97 Barnes.

98 Williams.

99 Salsberry.

100 Williams.

101 Barnes.

102 Barnes.

103 Salsberry.

104 Helen A. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans

Second Line,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 764.

105 Barnes.

106 In this passage, Raeburn is specifically referencing Michael G. White’s collaboration with Bennie Pete and the Hot 8 Brass Band after police killed trombonist

143

Joseph “Shotgun” Williams in December of 2006. Raeburn, “Faith, Hip-Hop, and Charity,”

144.

107 Salsberry.

108 Barnes.

109 Williams; Barnes; Salsberry.

110 Barnes.

111 Grant L. Harley, “Tree Rings as Environmental Indicators,” Berkshire

Encyclopedia of Sustainability ed. Ian Spellerberg, Daniel S. Fogel, Sarah E. Fredericks, and

Lisa M. Butler Harrington, vol. 6: Measurements, Indicators, and Research Methods for

Sustainability, (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2012): 359.

112 William R. Funderburk, Greogry A. Carter, and Carlton P. Anderson, “Evaluating the Influence of Elevation and Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Radial Growth in Slash Pine

(Pinus elliottii var. elliottii Engelm) on Cat Island, Mississippi, U.S.A.,” Journal of Coastal

Research 32, no. 3 (2016): 483.

113 Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory,” 754.

114 Williams.

115 Williams.

116 Salsberry.

117 Barnes.

144

CHAPTER FOUR

“Second Line to Bury White Supremacy”:

Take ’Em Down NOLA, Absent Monuments, and Residual Memories

“As we move forward, to the left, be reminded that’s the former location of the white supremacist monument,” Angela Kinlaw, educator, activist, and co-founder of Take ’Em

Down NOLA, exclaimed through a megaphone. Pointing four blocks away toward the end of

Iberville Street near the Mississippi River, she reiterated, “Over there, that’s the former location of the white supremacist monument!”1 Approximately one thousand marchers participating in the “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy” paused in a shaded patch of

North Peters Street at the foot of a statue of New Orleans’ founder Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne,

Sieur de Bienville in the French Quarter to listen to Kinlaw and catch their breath.2 “We going in,” Kinlaw added. “And we going in with a celebration in the light of day. They know good and well they didn’t put these monuments up in the dark, so why take them down in the dark? Let’s celebrate! Put your fist in the air!”3 The New Creations Brass Band struck up

“Ease on Down the Road” and the procession danced toward Canal Street. Eventually the second line would end at Lee Circle under a towering 60-foot Doric column holding a 16½- foot-tall statue of Robert E. Lee that was guarded on this day by scores of white nationalist demonstrators.4 It was May 7, 2017, and for those gathered on North Peters the second line was an opportunity to affirm through public demonstration that monuments associated with white supremacy must come down. Threats of violence would not deter the peaceful celebration of “the good people of New Orleans.”5

Four of New Orleans’ most prominent Jim Crow-era monuments were slated for removal in the summer of 2017, with the first, the Liberty Place Monument, disassembled on

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April 24th. By May 19th, statues of Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee also came down. The final cost totaled $2.1 million, with private donors covering approximately half and the city paying the rest.6 $1.1 million went to the Trident Response

Group, a private security contracting firm from Dallas, Texas.7 New Orleans’ concern with public safety proved prescient. National uproar concerning the fate of Confederate monuments reached a calamitous pitch exactly four months after the Liberty Place

Monument came down, when a white supremacist rammed a speeding car into a group demonstrating against the armed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The collision killed Heather Heyer and wounded 19 other demonstrators.8 In the aftermath of

Charlottesville, cities and towns across the United States—like Baltimore, Durham, Austin, and Memphis—rushed to remove Confederate statues. Others—like Nashville, D.C.,

Charleston, and St. Louis—rekindled longstanding debates about whether these monuments belong in public spaces to begin with.

The removal of Confederate statues, monuments, and flags has received substantial press coverage since 2015, and the media attention has only increased since the violence in

Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017. As monuments came down across the South— and the rest of the nation—questions surfaced about what to do with spaces formerly occupied by Confederate iconography. Should new statues be erected? Should parks be renamed and repurposed? Where should the old statues go? Embedded in these questions is a concern with the civic responsibilities that places of public memory arouse in their communities.9 Monuments project communal values. When monuments are removed what happens to the values they previously enshrined? How should absent monuments be remembered? Politicians, activists, preservationists, historians, and journalists have all

146 wrestled with these questions. And, as this chapter will demonstrate, rhetoricians are particularly well-positioned to explore this topic. While there are no simple answers, absent monuments provide fertile ground for developing theoretical insights into the nature of residual memory.

The Liberty Place Monument’s disassembly and the subsequent Second Line to Bury

White Supremacy proves a useful case for exploring the topic of absent monuments and residual memory. In this chapter, I theorize residual memory as the remaining rhetorical potency that clings to a commemorative site after the focal object or structure of memorialization is removed.10 Residual memory can be manifest in the physical landscape— in the plinths, descriptive plaques, sidewalks, benches, and ornamental foliage that remains, for example—or can emerge in the public use of the site—rallying protests, leaving flowers, erecting barricades, prompting lawsuits, or simply inspiring neglect. In order to interpret the residual memory of absent monuments, I argue that critics must attend to the physical landscape surrounding the monument, track the values the monument represented, and follow the discourses that inspired the monument’s removal. In so doing, critics can better interpret how absent monuments serve as useful rhetorical resources for contemporary communities.

This chapter begins with an overview of rhetorical theory concerning absence and monumental memory. In particular, I argue that recent public attention concerning the removal of Confederate monuments creates a need to theorize residual memory in spaces of absence. Next, I put the concept of residual memory to work with the case of the Liberty

Place Monument. In this section, I provide a brief history of the Liberty Place Monument that includes popular white supremacist justifications of its significance. Additionally, I detail three episodes from the Liberty Place Monument’s history to demonstrate how the obelisk

147 was deployed as a rhetorical resource by various communities. Finally, I close with an analysis of Take ’Em Down NOLA’s Second Line to Bury White Supremacy, arguing that grassroots activism, instead of ignoring or suppressing the residual memories of absent monuments, can mobilize these memories in service of broader social justice initiatives.

Rhetoric of Absent Monuments

That places of public memory are significant sites of rhetorical action has been, by now, well established.11 Geographer Kenneth E. Foote usefully describes the intended communicative function of monuments, arguing that, “the very durability of the landscape and of the memorials placed in the landscape makes these modifications to the landscape effective for symbolizing and sustaining collective values over long periods of time.”12

Monuments, in other words, are regularly thought of as more-or-less permanent vessels that transport historical lessons into an unknown future. Of course, the upending of Confederate monuments also upends such a conception of monuments more generally.

In her influential chapter on monuments as material rhetoric in Rhetorical Bodies,

Carole Blair pauses to raise the issue of removing monuments. Blair’s observations are particularly instructive when analyzing the fate of Confederate monuments in the United

States, so I quote at length:

Some texts, by virtue of their constitutive material, are obviously intended to endure;

and it seems a natural assumption, if not always a correct one, that such longevity is

granted to texts that communities see as more important than others. Granite and

bronze are more durable than ink on paper, and paper lasts longer than the moment of

oral discourse. It is an interesting paradox of materiality, however, that durable

materials may actually render a text more vulnerable. For example, any stone or metal

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structure, though composed of a hard, lasting substance, is more vulnerable to

destruction by hostile forces than is a book or even oral speech. Natural weathering,

vandalism, lack of maintenance, and even bulldozing (as we have seen vividly in

news accounts from the republics of the former Soviet Union) are more or less

constant threats to public memorial sites.13

In this passage, Blair reaffirms the rhetorical significance of monuments and offers guidance for critics analyzing monumental absences. In the context of monument removal in New

Orleans, Blair’s words find a new exigence.

Blair indicates that the importance of monumental values is directly related to size and perceptual permanence. That is to say, large, solidly built structures are generally more significant than smaller, flimsier ones—at least in the eyes of visitors and the communities that erect them.14 Additionally, the placement of a monument also matters. As rhetoric scholars Greg Dickinson and Giorgia Aiello point out, the design and function of “the urban built environment is communicative: It contributes to transforming and reproducing major ideological and structural conditions that, quite literally, mediate the everyday lives of individuals and communities.”15 In New Orleans, for example, the Liberty Place Monument and statues of Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard were all originally erected in landscaped circles on busy streets with streetcar lines. These stone and metal structures were not only imposing focal points in the city’s landscape, they were also highly trafficked nodes that commercial, tourist, and local passengers were forced to circumnavigate and literally look up to for over a century. The all-but-inescapable repetitiveness of rerouting around Jim Crow- era monuments served to engrain white supremacist ideologies into the fabric of everyday movement in New Orleans.16 The four monuments slated for removal in the summer of 2017

149 were invested with prestige by virtue of their size, material, and location. Only the statue of

Andrew Jackson in the heart of the French Quarter rivals the iconic prominence of the four statues removed in 2017.

The materiality of monuments like the ones disassembled in New Orleans—and the values they enshrine—make them frequent targets of supplemental alteration.17 Flowers, candles, and other tributes are regularly left outside of monuments.18 On the day before the

Second Line to Bury White Supremacy, for instance, printed signs bearing a message for

Mayor Landrieu were staked in decorative palmetto-holding sconces at the base of Lee’s column. Each sign appealed to communal unity as a justification for leaving the monuments in place, reading, “Mitch Please Stop Dividing Us.” On the other hand, Rev. Marie Galatas, a veteran civil rights advocate in New Orleans, told the crowd of second liners in Congo

Square an altogether different story about altering Lee Circle. She testified,

The Lord woke me up yesterday morning and told me, “Go to Robert E. Lee statue.

Get your anointed oil, walk up the step and point at it and say, ‘I rebuke the spirt of

Robert E. Lee.’”—Crowd: cheers—And I did it yesterday. Robert E. Lee shall come

down!19

Planting signs, sprinkling oil, and assembling to demonstrate all change a memorial landscape in both subtle and profound ways. “Such supplemental commemorations transmute the commemorative site from a completed text to a context for individual, but still public, memory practices,” Blair writes.20 It is little wonder that highly charged monuments attract alteration in the form of spray paint, vandalism, hooding, rallied communities of defenders and detractors, as well as institutionally sanctioned demolition.

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Despite the rhetorical power of New Orleans’ Jim Crow-era monuments, their presence subjected them to what Blair terms the “paradox of materiality.” The physicality of these structures opened them up to change—both natural and artificial. The history of the

Liberty Place Monument, for example, tellingly exhibits the far from permanent life of memorial architecture. The stone obelisk was knocked down in a storm in 1915, removed from its original location on Canal Street for “street cleaning” in 1989, re-erected at the foot of Iberville Street in 1993, and removed again in 2017.21 Furthermore, the inscription on the plinth was added to, sandblasted off, and covered with plaques several times22—not to mention the countless occasions the obelisk was vandalized. The mobility of seemingly permanent commemorative architecture, as exemplified by the Liberty Place Monument’s ambulation, demands a rhetorical account of the residual memories left behind in sites that monuments previously occupied.

Rhetoricians are well-positioned to analyze the residual memories of absent monuments because of sustained scholarly attention given to absence. While many authors have taken up the thorny topic, perhaps Raymie E. McKerrow put it most directly when he argued that “Absence is as important as presence in understanding and evaluating symbolic action.”23 Brian L. Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson expand on McKerrow’s point, explaining that, “Absence is not without meaning; rather, it is a fully embodied rhetorical experience. And like a well-placed pause in a speech, it is a material space filled with affect.”24 Figuring absence as a “material space” has significant ramifications for scholars engaging places of public memory because it means that interpreting commemorative landscapes as singular and static spaces obscures their layers of multitemporal plurality.25 In other words, absences in landscapes—what came before and is now gone—must be

151 accounted for as well. As Michel de Certeau argues, it is the lingering presence of multiple absences that make places inhabitable. “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.”26 Following Certeau’s logic, absences can be acknowledged or ignored; however, the prominence of monuments—like the ones removed in New Orleans—make their absence substantially more difficult to overlook.

For absent monuments to be useful rhetorical resources, material absences must be put in contact with contemporary exigences through the practice of public memory. Absence, after all, has long been figured as the fertile ground where memory is needed, cultivated, and subsequently emerges. Reaching back to ancient Greek accounts of memory, Kendall R.

Phillips points out that, “for Aristotle, as for Plato, memory is a potentially dangerous experience. Connected as it is with imagination, memory occupies an unstable and fantastical space of absence.”27 In other words, absence, like public memory and space, is itinerate, complexly fraught, and evocative. In the space carved out by absence, competing meanings are tested and contested. Absences certainly have antecedents that prefigure without predetermining meaning. It is through engagement with absence, punctuated in short bursts of attention or drawn out in processual encounters, that the rhetorical work of locating and defining public memory is accomplished. When absence is mentioned in relation to commemorative sites by rhetoricians, the point has generally been to attend to the omissions of a given museum, monument, or memorial landscape.28 However, it is equally important to evaluate the residual memory of monuments no longer standing.

Thinking again about the materiality of monuments, Blair writes, “Rhetoric, regardless of its medium, is introduced into a space that would be different in its absence. By

152 being introduced, it nominates itself for the attention of potential listeners, readers, or viewers.”29 When monuments are removed, however, attention does not suddenly vanish. In fact, quite the opposite was the case in New Orleans. When the Liberty Place Monument was dismantled at night, communities of activists, historical preservationists, and white supremacists mobilized to celebrate, lament, and rage over the missing memorial. The obelisk received considerably more attention after its removal then it had since its re-erection in 1993. The rhetorical significance of the disassembled monument was partially defined by the white supremacist values that led to its construction. In the following section, I introduce the history of the Liberty Place Monument in order to explain the rhetorical potency of its residual memory. As the demonstrations in 2017 made clear, the disassembled Liberty Place

Monument had the power to mobilize activists and preservationists who flocked to New

Orleans to celebrate or contest the obelisk’s removal.

The Liberty Place Monument

The values enshrined in the Liberty Place Monument have galvanized people to action since well before the obelisk was erected. Today, the residual memory of the absent limestone obelisk continues to serve as a rhetorical resource in New Orleans. However, to understand the complexity of the Liberty Place Monument’s residual memory it is important to engage the obelisk’s uses across history. Toward that end, this section provides a brief history of the origins of the Liberty Place Monument and describes three pivotal episodes from its past: the creation of the Board of Commissioners of Liberty Place in 1932, the rededication of the monument in 1993, and the removal of the obelisk in 2017.

The Battle of Liberty Place

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The 20-foot limestone obelisk known as the Liberty Place Monument was erected in

September 1891 at the foot of Canal Street on the fifteenth anniversary of the Crescent City

White League’s anti-Reconstruction “Battle of Liberty Place.”30 The highly orchestrated skirmish occurred on September 14, 1874, when “approximately 8,400 Democratic White

Leaguers easily routed a racially mixed force of 3,600 metropolitan policemen and State militia units.”31 Viewed by thousands who “thronged balconies, rooftops, and the decks of steamboats to watch,” the dramatic engagement lasted merely 20 minutes and resulted in 32 fatalities.32 Framed by “veterans” as a courageous and patriotic reassertion of self- determination and liberty in New Orleans,33 historian Lawrence N. Powell argues that the fight should be remembered within the context of the federal government’s retreat from

Reconstruction and the increasing boldness of bellicose southern Democrats. In this light, the battle “was a dramaturgical assertion of the right of the white upper class to rule at home.”34

Even before the obelisk was erected, appeals to the skirmish were used to instigate class- and race-based violence. For instance, on March 14, 1891, Uptown business elite gathered around a statue of Henry Clay on Canal Street reminding those assembled that they stood in the same place that their relatives met before they fought the “Battle of Canal Street” in 1874. The 1891 mob then tracked down “11 Sicilian defendants acquitted the day before of charges they had carried out a Mafia-ordered assassination of the city police chief.”35 The

Italians were captured and brutally lynched, which Powell ruefully points out, “gave a much- needed boost to a stalled local fundraising campaign to complete work on the Liberty Place

Monument.”36

After the obelisk was erected, the monument continued to function as a symbol of white supremacy in New Orleans. On September 27, 1932, the Commission Council of the

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City of New Orleans adopted No. 13,820 Commission Council Series which called for the formation of the Board of Commissioners of Liberty Place. In Section 1 of the statement, the

Commission Council wrote that the Board of Commissioners of Liberty Place should “be appointed from amongst citizens who took part in the Battle for white supremacy at Liberty

Place on September 14, 1874.”37 Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley approved the formation of the new commission the following day. Shortly thereafter, the Board of Commissioners of

Liberty Place clarified their position on the purpose of the obelisk by adding the following inscription to its plinth: “United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election in November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the

South and gave us our state.”38 As these words offered by representatives of New Orleans’ city government make clear, by the 1930s, the Liberty Place Monument was officially recognized as a symbol of white supremacy.

In 1955, Stuart Omer Landry, with the financial assistance of 18 members of the

Board of Commissioners of Liberty Place, extended the hagiography of the White League in his book, The Battle of Liberty Place: The Overthrow of Carpet-Bag Rule in New Orleans—

September 14, 1874. As the title suggests—and the author admits—the book “is more or less an editorial job.”39 In the introduction, Landry complains that the Battle of Liberty Place is all but forgotten in Louisiana and deemed unworthy of historical attention. On the first page,

Landry grumbles, “The present attitude towards colored people, entertained not only by

Northerners but by Southerners too, is inimical to the idea of ‘white supremacy.’”40 Despite this observation—and the unambiguous wording on the obelisk’s plinth and in the official commission approved by the Mayoralty of New Orleans in 1932—Landry goes on to insist that,

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The Battle of Liberty Place was not a race riot nor a struggle between whites and

Negroes. It was the effort of freedom-loving Americans to throw off the shackles of a

dictatorship of sordid politicians, illegally elected and holding office with the aid of

Federal bayonets.41

And yet, later in the introduction, Landry argues that the “majority of white people” across the South “could not see these poor blacks, ignorant and deluded, as their equals either socially or politically.”42 For Landry, the civil rights measures that accompanied

Reconstruction were too swift and too harsh for white Southern pride and economic systems to endure. In sum, Landry opines, “The South had reason to object to the Reconstruction laws, regulations and the methods of enforcement. Accordingly, they organized the Ku Klux

Klan, leagues and secret societies of various kinds to protect and defend their rights.”43

Clearly, the Liberty Place Monument, in Landry’s estimation in 1955, was a symbol that legitimized white Southerners’ right to violently defend a society based on the political principle of white superiority.

Given the words inscribed on the Liberty Place Monument in the 1930s and subsequently defended in Landry’s book, it is no surprise that, “From time to time, the obelisk has been a rallying point for the Ku Klux Klan and for one of its Grand Wizards,

David Duke.”44 As a political lightening rod that drew the admiration of avowed white supremacists, the monument also drew the ire of civil rights leaders in New Orleans; for instance, “The city’s first black mayor, Ernest N. Dutch Morial, tried to remove it.”45 And yet, the Liberty Place Monument remained where it was originally dedicated until 1989 when, using funds secured from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, construction workers removed the obelisk to make way for improvements to Canal Street.46

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The Liberty Place Monument stayed in storage until 1993, when a Federal District Court ruled that “since Federal money had been used to remove the monument, it had to be returned later to a historically appropriate spot.”47 When the Liberty Place Monument was reinstalled, the white supremacist inscription was covered by a plaque that included the names of the policemen killed fighting against the White League. The Federal lawsuit that led to the obelisk’s reinstallation was filed by Francis Shubert, a New Orleans pharmacist and a David Duke supporter.48 According to the Washington Post, Shubert’s lawsuit sought

“to have the new plaque removed and the monument placed at its original location.”49 By the early-1990s, despite its relocation and the covering of the inscription added in the 1930s, the

Liberty Place Monument was still firmly rooted in white supremacist ideologies; a fact that drew both former-Grand Wizard David Duke and veteran civil rights advocate Rev. Avery C.

Alexander to the obelisk on March 3, 1993.

Rededication of the Liberty Place Monument

Shortly after the re-erection of the obelisk after three years in storage, the Friends of

Liberty Monument held a rededication ceremony at the obelisk’s base on March 3, 1993.50

To the chagrin of the Friends of the Liberty Monument, the obelisk was not placed in its original location at the foot of Canal Street—the busy commercial and tourist thoroughfare that borders the French Quarter. Instead, city officials moved the obelisk a block away to the end of the less-trafficked Iberville Street, placing it indecorously in the shadow of a parking garage. Nevertheless, on March 3rd, supporters of the monument gathered around the obelisk waving the Stars and Stripes, the Louisiana state flag, and the Confederate battle flag.

Tensions hung in the air around the monument; threats of violence felt real for a number of reasons. Opponents of the Liberty Place Monument defaced the obelisk and

157 covered it with sheets in the leadup to the ceremony.51 David Duke, the inflammatory

Louisiana legislator and former Grand Wizard of the KKK, joined the group of rededicators as an invited speaker.52 He brought a personal bodyguard.53 And, according to Michael

Perlstein, a staff writer for the Times-Picayune, “About 50 people attending the ceremony were ringed by police officers even before the event began at about 2 p.m.”54

Shortly after the rededication began, a group of approximately 40 protestors led by

Rev. Avery C. Alexander, an 82-year-old civil rights activist and Louisiana state representative, interrupted the ceremony. According to Perlstein, the protestors “disrupted the hourlong ceremony by shouting slogans and singing spirituals, drowning out speakers” including Duke.55 The standoff became heated as protestors chanting “Down with white supremacy!” pushed—and were pushed—against the cordon of New Orleans Police

Department officers.56 Police seized several protestors, hauling them away from the confrontation. At one point, a white NOPD officer put the 82-year-old Rev. Alexander in a chokehold and forcibly dragged him away from the Liberty Place Monument while another

Figure 4.1. Rev. Avery C. Alexander at the rededication of the Liberty Place Monument on March 3, 1993. Photo by Kathy Anderson.

158 white officer brandished a nightstick and followed closely behind. The moment was caught on camera by Kathy Anderson, a professional photographer for the Times-Picayune, who framed the shot with the limestone obelisk and the Confederate battle flag standing over Rev.

Alexander, the police officers, journalists, rededicators, and protestors. The picture appeared on the front page of the newspaper the following day (see Figure 4.1).57

Anderson’s photograph sparked an uproar in New Orleans in 1993.58 In no uncertain terms, the image visually linked the Liberty Place Monument with white supremacy. By framing the monument in close proximity to the most potent icon of the Lost Cause—the

Confederate battle flag—both the obelisk and the flag appeared to tacitly endorse police violence directed at one of New Orleans’ most respected religious, political, and civil rights leaders. The photograph shattered the pretense of separation between the obelisk as an abstract symbol of white supremacy and enactments of physical violence perpetrated against people of color. The image of white police officers hauling Rev. Alexander away by his neck as Friends of the Liberty Monument looked on exposed the lie of drawing a distinction between symbols of white supremacy and the repressive powers of the state deployed to protect those very symbols.

Of course, the violent imagery captured in the photograph resonated with public and private memories of New Orleanians’ struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. In fact, the image is shockingly reminiscent of video-footage from 1964 that captured police officers dragging

Rev. Alexander by his ankles up two flights of stairs and then down another on the way out of City Hall after he attempted to desegregate the cafeteria (see Figure 4.2).59 However, far from portraying an episode from New Orleans’ not-so-distant past, Anderson’s photograph disturbed viewers in 1993 precisely because it depicted the city’s present. Rev. Alexander’s

159 protest as framed and preserved by Anderson’s camera grafted another layer to the complex stratigraphy of the Liberty Place Monument.60

Figure 4.2. Still images from nationally televised coverage of NOPD officers dragging Rev. Avery C. Alexander out of City Hall following his attempt to desegregate the cafeteria in 1964.

Later that month, New Orleans City Council held a hearing concerning the future of the obelisk. “This thing is an albatross around our necks,” argued Rev. Alexander during the hearing. “Move it, transfer it, give it to someone, lend it to someone, put it on a barge and let it drift out to sea, or better still, drop it into the sea.”61 David Duke also spoke at the hearing.

In his statement, Duke, like Stuart Omer Landry before him, attempted to recast the monument as a neutral marker of Southern heritage rather than a memorial to violent race- based political oppression. “The monument may be politically incorrect, but it is not a racist monument,” offered Duke. “We will do whatever we have to legally to keep it up even if it means removal of all federal monies from Louisiana. We have a right to preserve our monument and our heritage.”62 Duke’s argument caught the attention of performance scholar

Joseph Roach who attended the City Council hearing. Roach observed that Duke’s interpretation of the history of the Liberty Place Monument “provided the kind of stage of

160 misremembrance on which whiteness is traditionally performed.”63 As Roach makes clear, in

1993, the Liberty Place Monument was not simply an abstract symbol of American freedom, it was a rhetorical resource that allowed white supremacists, like Duke, to defend the normative privileges that accompany white masculinity. In addition to Roach’s observation, the obelisk also functioned as a rhetorical resource for civil rights advocates, like Rev.

Alexander, but in a different way. Rev. Alexander pointed to the monument—and the bodily mistreatment he experienced at the hands of NOPD officers protecting the Liberty Place

Monument—as a tangible expression of the pernicious and pervasive white supremacist ideologies that saturated contemporary New Orleans. In so doing, Rev. Alexander leveraged the obelisk as evidence that New Orleans required broader social change.

Removing the Liberty Place Monument

On April 24, 2017, 24 years after the rededication of the Liberty Place Monument, construction workers removed the obelisk without public announcement in the cover of darkness. Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s decision to remove the monument at night shocked and angered both proponents and opponents of the obelisk. The mayor, however, did not unilaterally order the removal of the Liberty Place Monument. At Mayor Landrieu’s behest,

New Orleans City Council voted on December 17, 2015 in a 6-1 decision to remove four of the city’s most prominent Jim Crow-era monuments. Immediately the decision was contested in court by four preservationist groups that contended that the city did not have the authority to remove the monuments. On March 6, 2017, following over a year of litigation, the 5th

Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of New Orleans City Council, clearing the way for the monuments’ removal.64

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Masked and body-armored crews working for an unnamed construction firm disassembled the Liberty Place Monument while armed police officers and hidden sharpshooters guarded workers laboring beneath a battery of floodlights.65 The reason for the secrecy, according to Mayor Landrieu, was safety: Contractors bidding to remove the four monuments had received death threats from white supremacists targeting workers, their families, and their businesses. Quite simply, contractors refused to do the work unless their identities remained anonymous, according to the mayor.66 In May, David Duke tweeted the address of the alleged construction firm contracted to remove the monuments. Presumably,

Duke wanted to facilitate some sort of reprisal. City Hall’s priority was to remove the monuments from New Orleans’ memorial landscape as quickly and efficiently as possible without inciting violence.

Despite the obelisk’s unannounced nighttime removal and unobtrusive location— wedged between a parking lot, parking garage, and a fenced electrical complex servicing an adjoining streetcar line—word got out about the arrival of construction crews. A handful of protestors, casual onlookers, and journalists showed up behind New Orleans Police

Department barricades to witness the removal of the first of the four monuments. Malcolm

Suber, professor, activist, and co-founder of Take ’Em Down NOLA, and Joey Cargol, an outspoken critic of removing the monuments, struck up a conversation while construction crews worked. “I know we’ve disagreed on a lot of things, but this is not the way things should be handled,” said Cargol. Suber agreed, adding “They could have done this, announced it and let people show their opinion. This is the coward’s way.”67

With the obelisk disassembled and trucked to an undisclosed location, journalists, activists, and preservations swung their attention to the three monuments slated for removal.

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Little remained of the Liberty Place Monument to alert passersby to its former presence. In fact, when I asked a parking attendant who flagged cars into the garage opposite the obelisk if she had been around when the monument was taken down, she did a quick double-take and exclaimed, “Oh my God! It’s gone. I wonder how long it’s been gone?”68 Given the fact that she had worked outside this particular garage for three years, her surprise was surprising, but understandable. That is, in 1993, city officials had the obelisk moved to an unassuming location where, by 2017, it was dwarfed by a large steel electric post. All that remained of the monument was a nondescript granite plinth resting on a cement block with squiggly scars on its face marking the place where adhesive bonded with the plaque added in 1993. An inclined cement path leads up to the plinth. The plinth itself looks strikingly similar to a sewer cover that is about the same size and located roughly fifteen feet away. Both the plinth and the sewer cover are bordered by the same small shrubbery.69 The plinth is already receding into the quotidian cityscape. Google Maps, however, still marks the location of the “Liberty

Monument” and features pictures of the obelisk standing at the foot of Iberville Street.

However, Google Maps, somewhat inaccurately, labels the monument’s hours of operation as

“Permanently closed.”70 Despite the Liberty Place Monument’s absence, Take ’Em Down

NOLA and the demonstrators who gathered two weeks later for the Second Line to Bury

White Supremacy called upon the residual memory of the obelisk as a rhetorical resource for protesting white supremacy.

“We Are One Band, One Sound”: Mobilizing Residual Memory

A few days after the Liberty Place Monument’s disassembly, Take ’Em Down NOLA announced the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy, maximizing public attention by scheduling the event for the last weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.71 In

163 their Facebook invitation for the second line, Take ’Em Down NOLA rebuked Mayor

Landrieu for his unwillingness to host a “ceremony to honor the historic occasion.” They rejected City Hall’s logic that secretive removals were necessary for public safety, writing,

“Cowering in darkness offers no safety or protection, it is shameful and being questioned by world wide media. // What does this say to Black youth? What does this teach white youth? //

All eyes are on New Orleans.”72 For Take ’Em Down NOLA, the removal of Jim Crow-era monuments in New Orleans was an exigence that could not go unaddressed; the city had a civic obligation to account for the residual memories of absent—or nearly absent— monuments.

Following the lead of rhetoric scholars Balthrop, Blair, and Michel, I take the Second

Line to Bury White Supremacy as an “interpretive aperture” that “provides guidance to the audience, offering or implying interpretations of the site that are preferred by those empowered to offer them.”73 While Balthrop, Blair, and Michel are specifically talking about

“ritual dedications of commemorative sites,” I apply their observations to a ritualized deconsecration enacted by Take ’Em Down NOLA, “a black-led, multiracial, intergenerational coalition.”74 While there are certainly differences between official dedications and activist deconsecrations, there are enough ritualized and rhetorical similarities to warrant using the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy as a “preferred hermeneutic.”75 Following the “hermeneutic prompts” offered by the second line opens up a unique vantage point for critical interpretation of the removal of the four Jim Crow-era monuments in New Orleans while forcefully correcting short-sighted explanations that credit white violence or the irresistible march of progress instead of decades of activism.76

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Take ’Em Down NOLA selected Congo Square as the starting point for the Second

Line to Bury White Supremacy. In her speech before the second line, Angela Kinlaw commented on the contradictory layers of New Orleans’ history. Kinlaw pointed out that

Congo Square, for example, was officially named Beauregard Square from 1893—the year

P.G.T. Beauregard died—to 2011, when City Council voted to change the name to Congo

Square.77 Though the space has served many purposes and had a handful of official names,

Congo Square is most remembered today as the colonial market where enslaved communities would congregate on the edge of town to sell goods, make music, and dance. This mixture of people of color, mainly from western Africa and the Caribbean, is supposed to have laid the foundations for the emergence of jazz.78 And yet, until 2011, the place was officially named after the man who ordered the shelling of Ft. Sumter and started the hostilities of the Civil

War.

Standing in Congo Square, Michael “Quess?” Moore, poet, activist, and co-founder of Take ’Em Down NOLA, played with the historic resonances of the place. “We are one band, one sound,” insisted Moore. Picking up speed, he delivered the next few lines in a percussive cadence, emphasizing the last word of every phrase until he was interrupted by cheers. “This is our party. They ain’t invited. They don’t know the music. They don’t know the tune. They can’t dance to the rhythm.”79 Moore’s anaphoric use of the impersonal subject pronoun “they” to reference white supremacists allowed him to bracket this group out of the celebration, focusing the persuasive energies of the second line on communities who could still be convinced that symbols of white supremacy do real violence. “This is the point of this entire conversation,” Moore continued after the cheering subsided.

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I love my city, we all love our city. If we could only aim our music in the right

direction; not just to the hearts, but to the minds. This is the most African city you

gonna find in North America. We’re just dominated by symbols of white supremacy;

that’s a crime. Somebody say, “That ain’t right.”—Crowd: That ain’t right!—Ain’t

right at all.80

As Moore’s opening remarks demonstrate, the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy leaned heavily on the celebratory street tradition of second lines and the music that accompanies them. This evocation of local brass band traditions served several distinct rhetorical purposes for Take ’Em Down NOLA, not the least of which was reclaiming urban spaces that previously existed under the shadow of white supremacist symbols.

Just as second line parades resonate deeply in New Orleans’ historically black neighborhoods, Jim Crow-era monuments inspire generational memories of moments when these structures served as rallying points for racist violence to coalesce and lash out.81 While white supremacist iconography inspired racist violence in Charleston in 2015 and became a primary justification for New Orleans’ City Hall to act, Take ’Em Down NOLA evoked a much longer history of public official’s inaction in the aftermath of violence breaking out around New Orleanian monuments. Rev. Marie Galatas told second liners in Congo Square that the movement to remove the Liberty Place Monument began in the 1970s when she and

Rev. Alexander teamed up with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to condemn the presence of memorials to the Lost Cause.82 Likewise, Malcolm Suber paid tribute to the leadership of Rev. Dr. Simmie Lee Harvey who co-founded the SCLC in 1957 and City

Councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor who is most remembered for her efforts to desegregate

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Mardi Gras parades in the 1990s.83 The speeches in Congo Square were reinforced by Take

’Em Down NOLA’s Facebook announcement, which stated that,

The Second Line will feature enlarged photos of Rev. Avery Alexander, Alton

Sterling, and the students who toppled the Rhodes statue in South Africa. The event

will honor our veteran civil rights heroes who have worked for 6 decades to see the

monuments come down.84

Far from a response to seemingly anomalous instances of white supremacist violence, Take

’Em Down NOLA told a story of intergenerational systemic oppression, indifferent politicians, and police brutality that operated with tacit endorsement beneath prominent icons of white supremacy. By enlarging the historic scope of the struggle to remove Jim Crow-era monuments, Take ’Em Down NOLA argued that the disassembly of the Liberty Place

Monument was not an act of benevolence from the city’s white mayor; rather, it was an important victory in a multigenerational struggle that included the living, the dead, and the unknown efforts of future activists. Take ’Em Down NOLA’s Second Line to Bury White

Supremacy drew attention to the bodies of activists, like Rev. Alexander, Dorothy Mae

Taylor, Rev. Marie Galatas, and others who repeatedly bore the brunt of violence in their lifelong struggle for civil rights and against the ideologies enshrined in public memorials like the Liberty Place Monument. Through a ritualized second line, Take ’Em Down NOLA offered the living memories of “veteran civil rights heroes” as a suitable replacement for the soon-to-be absent monumental memories of the Lost Cause.

The Second Line to Bury White Supremacy capitalized on an ambiguous slippage between traditional second line parades and jazz funeral processions. Second lines have a very specific meaning in New Orleans. They are celebratory brass band events sponsored by

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Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs and held annually on Sundays from August until March.85

Historically, second lines processed through predominately black neighborhoods in the city as joyful displays of communal strength and solidarity,86 but the “proliferation of staged

‘second lines’ that are increasingly produced in service of the tourism and entertainment industries and to promote political and commercial interests” has damaged the link between neighborhood-communities and the unique traditions they have nurtured for generations.87

Even so, in New Orleans, second lines are understood as exuberant celebrations of life and community.

Jazz funerals, on the other hand, are thoroughly associated with mourning and death.

Despite the jazz funeral’s traditional role as a solemn ritual for expressing communal grief, the second part of a jazz funeral—commonly known as the second line—is punctuated by mourning turning toward the celebration of a life well-lived and a community that is better off for having known the deceased. Because the second part of a jazz funeral is also called a second line, and because the terms jazz funeral and second line have been used interchangeably in touristic literature, the two distinct brass band traditions are regularly collapsed into one by people outside of New Orleans’ musical community.88 Take ’Em Down

NOLA subtly exploited the ambiguous connections between the two traditions. Instead of calling the event a “jazz funeral,” which would imply honoring the fallen Liberty Place

Monument, Take ’Em Down NOLA designated the parade as a “second line,” priming the audience for a celebration. However, calling the event a Second Line to Bury White

Supremacy retains funereal associations. In short, Take ’Em Down NOLA blended familiar local brass band traditions and exploited the physical absence of the Liberty Place Monument to create a funeral celebration that paid no honor to the departed.

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Hosting a “second line” instead of a protest march further enabled Take ’Em Down

NOLA to assert control of the streets and refigure the residual memories of New Orleans commemorative spaces by saturating them with celebratory bodies, voices, and music.89

Before the second line began, Kinlaw spoke to the assembled crowd in Congo Square, justifying Take ’Em Down NOLA’s focus on removing statues and renaming streets, schools, and other symbols of white supremacy: “[W]e understand that symbols are used to bond people around cultural values, political values, and ideologies that show up in the form of a system and that oppresses people.”90 The four monuments in question, erected between 1884 and 1915—three decades with some of the highest rates of lynching in the United States— stood as all but inalterable facts of the city’s landscape for over a century. Their existence exuded what Carole Blair, writing about memorials in the United States, calls a “recalcitrant

‘presentness’”91 that indexed through sheer scale and prominence the continued dominance of Lost Cause ideologies in New Orleans’ most highly trafficked and revered places of public memory. By dancing, singing, and chanting through a cityscape mired in three centuries of white supremacist violence—most clearly manifested and sustained by Jim Crow-era monuments—Take ’Em Down NOLA powerfully presented an alternative memory of New

Orleans. In this memory people of color were not relegated to the invisible margins of the city’s past, present, and future; instead, through the visible and audible occupation of public space, second liners asserted that people of color are integral shapers of New Orleans’ landscape, culture, and history.

Against white-washed versions of history symbolized by Jim Crow-era monuments,

Take ’Em Down NOLA drew from jazz funeral and second line traditions to enthusiastically endorse the removal of the Liberty Place Monument and celebrate the impending removal of

169 statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate generals P.G.T.

Beauregard and Robert E. Lee. The Second Line to Bury White Supremacy further condemned the presence of “white supremacists gather[ing] from many states around confederate monuments in OUR CITY” while making an impassioned plea “for social and economic equality.”92 The goal of the second line was not—as many opponents suggested— to force the erasure of history through the destruction of monuments. Instead, the massive musical gathering worked to adjust the city to an altered memorial landscape where the residual memories of absent monuments could function as rhetorical resources that galvanize communities to strive for more just and equal societies. The combination of local funereal and street celebration traditions provided the rhetorical apparatus for shifting public memories of racialized oppression in New Orleans away from monumental structures that inspired nostalgic awe and reverence for white “heroes” of the Lost Cause and toward the embodied and resistant memories of activist communities.

Residual Memories, Activist Communities, and Monuments to White Supremacy

In a political climate stoked by grief, fear, and anger, it is easy to lose sight of the historical fact that removing symbols of the Lost Cause from spaces of public veneration was not merely catalyzed by white men unleashing white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and Charleston in 2015. Instead, as this chapter demonstrates, black-led activism sustained calls for the removal of white supremacist monuments from the moment they were first erected in the late-1800s and early-1900s, continued as they cropped up again during the

Civil Rights movement, and carry on to this day. Overemphasizing the role that episodes of white supremacist violence played in removing Jim Crow-era monuments has dangerous implications. Namely, crediting acts of terrorism as the catalyst for action rewrites the

170 historical narrative so that benevolent white persons holding political office appear to respond only to the exigence of violence rather than generations of black-led activism that tirelessly worked to undermine systems of oppression publicly manifest by icons of the Lost

Cause. Put simply, when white supremacist violence is portrayed as the sole catalyst for action, over a century of political activism is swept under the rug. For this reason, it is important for rhetorical critics engaging debates over the residual memory of absent monuments in the United States to pay special attention to activist accounts of how and why these monuments must come down.

While studying the official justifications offered by Mayor Landrieu and New

Orleans City Council for removing four of the city’s Jim Crow-era monuments is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, this chapter picked up the less-well-attended narratives of Take ’Em

Down NOLA whose grassroots activism continues to lead the push to remove all symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans. The Second Line to Bury White Supremacy usefully illustrates how absent monuments can alter public memories, spur democratic discourse, and, ultimately, produce political change. Take ’Em Down NOLA’s example clarifies how residual memories of absent monuments can be leveraged as rhetorical resources for activist communities who tell fuller histories of oppressive commemorative architecture as part of their ongoing fight for justice.

1 Italicized words are used to mark emphasis in the speech. Angela Kinlaw, audio recording of “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy,” May 7, 2017.

2 The total number of demonstrators in attendance is disputed. Take ’Em Down

NOLA, the sponsoring organization, said there were 1200 demonstrators, while the New

Orleans Police Department said the number was closer to 700 as reported by USA Today. The

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number of demonstrators likely fluctuated over the course of the event. “A Great Victory

Yesterday,” Take ’Em Down NOLA, May 8, 2017, http://takeemdownnola.org/updates/;

Wynton Yates, “Groups Clash Over Removal of New Orleans Confederate Monuments,”

USA Today, May 8, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation- now/2017/05/08/new-orleans-confederate-monument-removal-protests/312608001/.

3 Kinlaw.

4 “How Tall is the Statue of Robert E. Lee?,” WGNO (New Orleans, LA), May 19,

2017, http://wgno.com/2017/05/19/how-tall-is-the-statue-of-robert-e-lee/.

5 “Celebrate Them Coming Down,” Take ’Em Down NOLA, n.d., accessed August 23,

2017, https://www.facebook.com/events/759009697610511/.

6 Richard Rainey, “Confederate Monument Removal in New Orleans Costs $2.1

Million,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 9, 2017, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/06/confederate_monuments_removal_2.html.

7 Richard Rainey, “Confederate Monuments: Extremist Threats Doubled New

Orleans Removal Budget, Officials Say,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 9, 2017, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/06/confederate_monuments_extremis.html.

8 Joe Heim, “Recounting a Day of Rage, Hate, Violence and Death,” Washington

Post, August 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville- timeline/?utm_term=.f291071e8bb3.

9 For more on “places of public memory” see, Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and

Brian L. Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials

(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010).

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10 I do not use the phrase “residual memory” in the narrow sense defined by gerontologist Belle Boone Beard. “We have arbitrarily labeled as ‘residual memories’ those memories which remain clear and can be readily recalled in one’s second century of living.”

Instead, this chapter offers residual memory as the remaining rhetorical potency that clings to a commemorative site after the focal object of memorialization is removed. Residual memory, this chapter argues, can be manifest in the physical landscape, in digital archives, and in public uses of the former site of memorialization. A key difference between this chapter’s use of residual memory and Beard’s is that memory, in this chapter, is a fundamentally social phenomenon. Memory, that is, is a process that unfolds collectively rather than individually. Belle Boone Beard, “Social and Psychological Correlates of

Residual Memory in Centenarians,” The Gerontologist 7, no. 2 (1967): 120.

11 See Dickinson, Blair, and Ott; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki,

“Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,”

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 29.

12 Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and

Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 33.

13 Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s

Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 37.

14 This line of argument came up in my interview with New Orleans journalist and cultural commentator Lolis Eric Elie about the importance of erecting a cenotaph for Buddy

Bolden (discussed in chapter one). Elie argues that in the United States there is a “language of honor” whereby important historical figures are memorialized with correspondingly large

173

or small monuments. The point, as Elie raised it, was to interrogate which individuals and communities have been “dishonored” by their omission from the United States’ memorial landscape. Interview with Lolis Eric Elie, January 20, 2017.

15 Greg Dickinson and Giorgia Aiello, “Being Through There Matters: Materiality,

Bodies, and Movement in Urban Communication Research,” International Journal of

Communication 10 (2016): 1295.

16 Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Stephen P. Depoe, “Everyday Life and Death in a Nuclear

World: Stories from Fernald,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life ed. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa: The University of

Alabama Press, 2010), 91.

17 Blair, 40.

18 “The activity of supplementing is an old one at commemorative sites; the practice of decorating graves and other personal memory sites with flowers and intimate tokens is not uncommon…. The custom has become common at other new commemorative sites.” Blair,

40. “The act of supplementing a commemorative site—usually by leaving intimate tokens or decorations—has become increasingly important in public commemorations. By leaving objects at these sites, individual visitors attempt to alter the meaning of otherwise officially articulated spaces by adding to their preexisting rhetoric(s).” Thomas R. Dunn,

“Remembering ‘A Great Fag’: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer

Space,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 450.

19 Rev. Marie Galatas, audio recording of “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy,”

May 7, 2017.

20 Blair, 40.

174

21 Stuart Omer Landry, The Battle of Liberty Place; The Overthrow of Carpet-Bag

Rule in New Orleans—September 14, 1874 (New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Company,

1955), 229; Michael Perlstein, “5 Arrested at Monument Ceremony—Legislator Leads

Protest,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), March 8, 1993, B1, accessed August 4, 2017, http://infoweb.newsbank.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/resources/doc/nb/news/0FA80BE1A

592296E?p=AWNB; Jeff Adelson, “Removing New Orleans’ Liberty Place Monuments

Means City Moving to ‘Place of Healing,’ Mitch Landrieu Says,” The New Orleans

Advocate, April 24, 2017, http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_2d8c0e22-

2940-11e7-9d19-ff9e52d31f52.html.

22 Lawrence N. Powell, “Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk-Stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics,” Slavery & Abolition 20, no. 1

(1999): 127-149.

23 Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication

Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 107.

24 Brian L. Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns:

Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural

Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 217.

25 For more on the layering of memory in New Orleans see, Shannon Lee Dawdy,

Patina: A Profane Archaeology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For more on spatialized time, see Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2005).

26 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life trans. Steven F. Rendall

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 108.

175

27 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public

Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 216.

28 Roberta Chevrette, “Holographic Rhetoric: De/Colonizing Public Memory at

Pueblo Grande,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method ed. Sara L. McKinnon,

Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park: The

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 148-162; Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, 215-239; and

Dunn, 435-460.

29 Blair, 46.

30 For more on the development of historical memory concerning the Battle of Liberty

Place, including how the skirmish came to be known as the Battle of Liberty Place, see

Powell, 127-149.

31 Powell, 131.

32 Powell, 131.

33 See, for example, the introduction in Landry, 1-4.

34 Powell, 131.

35 Powell, 127.

36 Powell, 128.

37 Landry, 230.

38 Jarvis DeBerry, “Taking Down Liberty Place Monument Undoes a Rewrite of

History: Opinion,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), April 27, 2017, http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2017/04/monuments_new_orleans.html.

39 Landry, i.

40 Landry, 1.

176

41 Landry, 1.

42 Landry, 2.

43 Landry, 2.

44 Frances Frank Marcus, “New Orleans Journal; A Monument That Can’t Find a

Home,” New York Times, November 29, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/29/us/new- orleans-journal-a-monument-that-can-t-find-a-home.html.

45 Marcus, “New Orleans Journal.”

46 John E. DeSantis, “Monumental Division in New Orleans,” Washington Post,

March 22, 1993, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/03/22/monumental- division-in-new-orleans/22f3e654-20bc-4748-822a-

78aa2d2df42e/?utm_term=.25e89b4424b5.

47 Frances Frank Marcus, “A New Orleans Monument to Strife Stirs Up More,” New

York Times, March 31, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/31/us/a-new-orleans- monument-to-strife-stirs-up-more.html.

48 DeSantis.

49 DeSantis.

50 Perlstein.

51 Perlstein.

52 Gary Boulard, “Historian Sees Red Over White Supremacist ‘Help,’” Los Angeles

Times, June 9, 1993, http://articles.latimes.com/1993-06-09/news/mn-1245_1_white- supremacy.

53 Perlstein.

54 Perlstein.

177

55 Perlstein.

56 Perlstein.

57 Anderson’s photo also ran in the New York Times. Marcus, “A New Orleans

Monument to Strife.” Anderson’s photo can be viewed on the Times-Picayune website here: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/03/confederate_monuments_liberty.html.

58 See “Readers Talk About Race” in the “Together Apart: The Myth of Race” series conducted by the Times-Picayune in 1993. Jim Amoss, “Introduction: Together Apart: The

Myth of Race (1993),” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), August 20, 2015, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/page/togetherapart_the_myth_of_race.html.

59 Leonard N. Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African

American Activism from World War II to Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2010), 51. Still images can be found in “Honoring the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther

King,” 3ChicsPolitico, posted by SouthernGirl2 on January 20, 2014, accessed January 28,

2018, https://3chicspolitico.com/2014/01/20/honoring-the-legacy-of-dr-martin-luther-king/.

60 Archaeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy writes, “Stratigraphy or ‘writing in the ground’ is the term archaeologists use for the layers and physical features they uncover as they excavate.” Dawdy goes on to define social stratigraphy as “the agency of things from the past in constituting our everyday lives in the present.” Dawdy, 40-41.

61 Rev. Avery C. Alexander as quoted in DeSantis.

62 David Duke as quoted in DeSantis.

63 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1996), 240.

178

64 Bill Chappell, “New Orleans Can Remove Confederate Statues, Federal Appeals

Court Says,” National Public Radio, March 7, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2017/03/07/518986603/new-orleans-can-remove-confederate-statues-federal-appeals- court-says; Kevin Litten, “New Orleans Confederate Monuments Can Come Down, Court

Rules,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), March 6, 2017, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/03/confederate_monuments_appeals_1.html.

65 Adelson, “Removing New Orleans’ Liberty Place.”

66 Jeff Adelson, “Landrieu Opens Up on Threats to Contractors, ‘$600,000 and

Change,’ Future After Monument Removals,” The New Orleans Advocate, April 27, 2017, http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_5e1296b2-2baa-11e7-b97b-

174ab456e171.html.

67 Jeff Adelson, “Removing New Orleans’ Liberty Place.”

68 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument,’ French Quarter, New Orleans, LA, 5:16pm

5/6/2017.”

69 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument.’”

70 Google Maps listed the Liberty Place Monument as “Permanently closed” on May

6, 2017. The Google Maps page for the Liberty Place Monument will be addressed in greater detail in the conclusion of this study.

71 Mayor Landrieu, who refused to announce the dates and times for the removal of the four monuments did state that the monuments would not come down during either weekend of Jazz Fest. Emma Scott, “Confederate Monument Removal Protest Banner Flies

Over Jazz Fest,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), April 29, 2017, updated May 2, 2017, http://www.nola.com/jazzfest/index.ssf/2017/04/monument_protest_banner_flies.html.

179

Linking the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy with economic justice for bearers of New

Orleans’ culture, Take ’Em Down NOLA wrote in their Facebook invitation for the event that, “All eyes are on New Orleans. It is fitting that during Jazz Fest the people have our voices heard. Not just on the monuments, but for racial equality and economic justice for those who built New Orleans, whose heritage is leveraged for profit and who are being displaced.” “Celebrate Them Coming Down.”

72 “Celebrate Them Coming Down.”

73 V. William Balthrop, Carole Blair, and Neil Michel, “The Presence of the Present:

Hijacking ‘The Good War’?,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 171.

74 Michael “Quess?” Moore as quoted by Clint Smith, “The Young Black Activists

Targeting New Orleans’s Confederate Monuments,” New Republic, May 18, 2017 https://newrepublic.com/article/142757/young-black-activists-targeting-new-orleanss- confederate-monuments.

75 Balthrop, Blair, and Michel, 171.

76 Balthrop, Blair, and Michel, 172, 180, 188.

77 Kinlaw.

78 For more on the roots of New Orleans brass band music and jazz see, Bruce Boyd

Raeburn, New Orleans Style and the Writing of Jazz History (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 2012); Matt Sakakeeny, “New Orleans Music as a Circulatory System,”

Black Music Research Journal 31, no. 2 (2011): 291-325; and Michael G. White, “The New

Orleans Brass Band: A Cultural Tradition,” in Triumph of the Soul: Cultural and

Psychological Aspects of African American Music, ed. Ferdinand Jones and Arthur C. Jones

(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 69-96.

180

79 Michael “Quess?” Moore, audio recording of “Second Line to Bury White

Supremacy,” May 7, 2017.

80 Moore.

81 For more on the role of the Liberty Place Monument as a rallying place for political intimidation and violence see Powell, 127-149. For more on the power of monuments to dominate narratives of public memory, see Laura Michael Brown, “Remembering Silence:

Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins,” Rhetoric Society

Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2018): 49-70; Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, 29; Foote, 33; Blair, 45.

82 Galatas.

83 Malcolm Suber, audio recording of “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy,” May

7, 2017.

84 “Celebrate Them Coming Down.”

85 Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New

Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 4 (1999): 472.

86 Michael G. White, “Reflections of an Authentic Jazz Life in Pre-Katrina New

Orleans,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 823-824; Joel Dinerstein, “Second

Lining Post-Katrina: Learning Community from the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure

Club,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 621; Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the

Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2006), 1.

87 Regis, “Second Lines,” 472.

181

88 Chelsea Brasted, “‘The Streets Are Yours’: Second-Lines Become and Industry in

New Orleans,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 8, 2016, http://www.nola.com/living/index.ssf/2016/09/second_lines_new_orleans_parad.html.

89 Regis, “Second Lines,” 472-504; Helen A. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of

Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 754;

Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2013), 33-34; Dinerstein, 624; and Bruce Boyd Raeburn, “‘They’re Tryin’ to Wash Us Away,’: New Orleans Musicians Surviving Katrina,” Journal of American

History 94, no. 3 (2007): 813.

90 Kinlaw.

91 Blair, 17.

92 Emphasis in the original text. “Celebrate Them Coming Down.”

182

CONCLUSION

“I’m sitting on an unassuming chunk of granite that looks like cement from 10 feet away,” I wrote in my journal of fieldnotes on May 6, 2017, the day before the Second Line to

Bury White Supremacy.1 That chunk of granite was the plinth of the Liberty Place

Monument—all that publicly remained of the obelisk twelve days after its removal. Even though I lived in New Orleans for almost a year, travelled to the city to visit friends and attend conferences, and returned on multiple occasions to conduct research for this project, I never visited the Liberty Place Monument while it stood. My failure to visit the obelisk is a testament to its inauspicious location. Even so, because the obelisk was placed next to a public parking lot and parking garage servicing the French Quarter, it is likely that I passed the monument on one of my many visits to the city, but I never paid it any attention. Once the monument was removed, I was consumed with curiosity—what was this former place of public memory like?

As this study has demonstrated, New Orleans is a city composed of densely packed, and often contradictory, memories.2 Rhetorician and New Orleans resident T.R. Johnson writes that New Orleans is “A politically charged—and incredibly complicated—place that

I’ve often described as the cultural equivalent of a coral reef, layer upon layer of social memory forged by the riptide of a deeply racialized, national history.”3 Archaeologist

Shannon Lee Dawdy concurs with Johnson, describing the city in this way: “The landscape of New Orleans presents a particularly dense palimpsest of landmarks, tall tales, omissions, iconic images, renovations, and ‘blight.’ But it is not an entirely unreadable one.”4 The palimpsestic layers of the cityscape are memories expressed through scarred landscapes, monumental architecture, personal accounts, activist events, and communal traditions. As

183 each chapter of this study has shown, funerary rituals and architecture are used rhetorically to emphasize nearly forgotten memories or transition a community beyond traumatic memories.

In 2018, with New Orleans in the midst of its 300th anniversary, contested public memories of the city’s past have received extra attention. In fact, city officials and tourist boosters alike, motivated by national concerns regarding racially charged histories, carefully reassessed many spaces of public memory. The most obvious change made to the cityscape in the lead-up to the tercentennial, of course, was the removal of four prominent Jim Crow- era monuments over the summer. But the removal of monuments should not be confused with the erasure of public memory.

The act of void-filling, what performance scholar Joseph Roach calls “surrogation,” is already working on the gaps left by absent monuments. Roach defines surrogation in this way:

In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but

continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that

constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other

forms of departure, I hypothesize, survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates.

Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely,

surrogation rarely if ever succeeds.5

The relative success of surrogation, as Roach puts it, is difficult to measure. However, what is apparent to rhetorical critics is that the processes of surrogation alter public modes of memorialization.

For instance, the day after the statue of P.G.T. Beauregard was taken down outside of

City Park and the descriptive plaque pried off, Michael Kimball and Christopher Kimball of

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Norco, Louisiana, tagged the plinth in red spray paint. Their message read, “Gen. Beauregard

// CSA.” For their documentary vandalism, the father-son duo was, somewhat ironically, arrested and “booked on counts of criminal damage to a historic landmark or building by defacing with graffiti.”6 In a separate case, the well-established channels of Carnival are playing a part in rehabilitating myths of the Lost Cause. Of course, the imbrication of white supremacy with Mardi Gras is far from new; almost since the pre-Lenten festival was first imported to colonial Louisiana, Mardi Gras has been controlled by New Orleans’ white business elite and their secret societies.7 And so, it is unsurprising that the R.E. Lee

Monumental Association allegedly manufactured and distributed 10,000 Mardi Gras beads emblazoned with the message “Lee Circle Forever” that were most likely thrown in Mardi

Gras parades this year.8

Both cases mark a shift in the mode that the Confederacy is publicly memorialized in

New Orleans. Absent officially sanctioned monuments that display figures from the Lost

Cause’s pantheon of heroes, public memories of the Confederacy are forced to decentralize and disperse. Again, this does not mean, as some historic preservationists and white nationalists contend, that Confederate memories are erased. Rather, it means that the rhetorical modes of memorialization are no longer physically anchored to public spaces with stone and metal commemorative architecture. In short, Confederate memories are now less visible in New Orleans and, therefore, are seemingly less permanent.

In the Kimball’s case, a temporary activist text-based memory replaces the monuments in the very spaces statues once stood. In much the same way that Da Truth Brass

Band asserted control of the streets through second line traditions during the removal of

P.G.T. Beauregard’s statue, the Kimball’s spray paint temporarily reclaimed the territory for

185

Confederate memories of the “little Creole.” Similar bodily strategies were mobilized in

Charlottesville before the “Unite the Right” rally when demonstrators shouted “You will not replace us!” and marched through the University of Virginia’s campus gathering around a statue of Thomas Jefferson.9

In the “Lee Circle Forever” case, disposable tokens of memory replace the sturdier monumental structures.10 The Lee Circle throws demonstrate a lived belief that governments may take statues down, but memories can be collected, preserved, and circulated through the rhetorical efforts of committed communities. In effect, this version of memory is not altogether different from the circulation of sepia-toned photographs and polychrome postcards of demolished New Orleanian landmarks like the French Opera Theatre that burned down in 1919. In fact, the absence of the landmarks captured in the images may even make them more valuable sentimentally as well as economically. These tokens of memory are preserved—or recreated—for collectors and tourists alike. Images of absence play on a kind of “antique fetish” that foments commodified versions of nostalgia and distributes them to paying customers. As Dawdy observes of collecting habits in New Orleans, “The antique fetish can be a displacement for a lost world or a dead loved one, but it can also be a kind of preservation of something you fear losing in the future.”11 For Confederate sympathizers who already lost their statues, Mardi Gras trinkets and spray paint are rhetorical tools for clinging to mythologies of the “Old South.”

Not all absent monuments, however, enjoy the same levels of public commitment that statues to Lee, Beauregard, and Davis inspired in New Orleans. When the Liberty Place

Monument was the first taken down in New Orleans in the summer of 2017, the obelisk initially caused quite a stir. However, the importance of the bygone obelisk waned

186 considerably in the media firestorm that accompanied the removal of statues of three

Confederate leaders. In fact, while New Orleans’ city government plans to place new statues on the abandoned plinths that formerly held Lee, Beauregard, and Davis, no such plans have been made for the base of the Liberty Place Monument. As Jeff Adelson reported in the New

Orleans Advocate, “The site of the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, a white supremacist uprising against the state’s Reconstruction-era government, will be left vacant.

That site, on Iberville Street behind the parking garage at Canal Place, is largely out of public sight.”12 And I might add, out of public mind.

Still, as a rhetorical critic studying public memory in New Orleans, I wanted to see what was left of the Liberty Place Monument. Before heading to the site where the obelisk most recently stood, I opened my computer and searched for the street address on Google

Maps. I found the location without much trouble. What surprised me, as I point out in chapter four, was that the “Liberty Monument” was listed as “Permanently closed” (see Figure C.1).

While writing this conclusion in February 2018, I searched Google Maps again to see if the

Liberty Monument entry was updated with current images of the site. As I expected, the

Figure C.1. Google Maps showing Liberty Place Monument as “Permanently closed.” Google Maps’ January 2017 street view image of the Liberty Place Monument.

187 image in the “street view” feature is from January 2017 and still depicts the obelisk standing almost nine months after it was removed (see Figure C.1). In the foreground of Google’s image are two women with strollers walking along the sidewalk with their heads pointed forward, not heeding the nineteenth-century monument to their left. Immediately behind them are a man and woman walking closely together. The woman holds the hand of a young child. All three have their backs to the Liberty Place Monument as if returning to the sidewalk after getting a closer look at the obelisk. Of course, as I learned while sitting on the plinth in May, the landscape surrounding the obelisk both attracts and deflects attention.

As I argue in chapter four, the many industrial features surrounding the former site of the Liberty Place Monument—i.e., sewer covers, chain-link fences, parking lots, parking garages, and large steel electricity poles—mark the landscape as historically insignificant. I observed in my fieldnotes that, “now people walk by blandly, sometimes looking at me, mostly looking like nothing significant could have ever been here in this corner wedged between the barbed wire fence guarding what looks like a generator for the railway tracks on the other side.”13 While I sat and scribbled notes, a tour bus drove by. I looked up to see what the people in the bus were looking at, but the windows were too tinted for me to see.14

Because the street conveniently loops back to Canal, a major commercial thoroughfare that boarders the French Quarter, I doubt that the bus drove by to share the absence of an obelisk with paying customers.

The ramped sidewalk leading to the obelisk, a simple inclined plane, turned out to be quite an intriguing feature of the landscape for children. I overheard one child loudly exclaim that the ramp would be perfect for skateboarding. Another child walked all the way up the sidewalk to the base of the plinth—where I was seated—before abruptly turning with a smile

188 and sprinting back down the sidewalk.15 Looking back at the picture published on Google

Maps with my experience in mind, it seems just as likely that the adults accompanied their child to play on the Liberty Place Monument as it is likely that they wanted to get a closer look at the monument. Other than the playfulness of children, hardly any attention was given to the former location of the Liberty Place Monument.

While jotting down notes from this experience, I felt the need to leave a message of my own. I didn’t have any spray paint, so I tore a page out of my journal and scrawled a short note. I searched around for a couple of loose chunks of asphalt or concrete to weigh down my message; it was a blustery day. During this search, I stumbled across a couple of broken down cardboard boxes arranged into a pallet a mere 15 feet or so away from the plinth. The cardboard lay in the shade of a shrub that connected with an adjoining fence. In this secluded nook, someone could escape the fierce heat of the sun and enjoy a measure of privacy from the prying eyes of police or other passersby. From the assorted food wrappers and stained cardboard, I deduced that someone recently reclined in the out of the way spot. I did not initially record this discovery because it did not immediately strike me as significant. In fact, it was not until I returned to Pennsylvania that I wrote this experience down in my journal, reflecting, “I’m inclined to interpret the card board [sic] mat as further evidence that the location of the White League’s obilisk [sic] is a site of public occlusion or hiding; a first step toward absence.”16 In what Carole Blair calls the “paradox of materiality,” the physical presence of the obelisk meant that it was exposed to removal from the moment it was erected.17 However, the out-of-the-way reinstallation of the monument in 1993 and a quarter century of languishing outside of the public eye ultimately exposed the obelisk to memorial erasure.

189

As much as the Liberty Place Monument may appear to be fading from public memory, its former prominence persists in some surprising places. The Second Line to Bury

White Supremacy certainly leaned on the monumental absence of the obelisk, but in a peculiar way. Usually, second line parades stop at significant landmarks associated with prominent members of the sponsoring Social Aid and Pleasure Club—houses, bars, favorite hangouts, etc.18 However, the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy did not parade to the site where the obelisk once stood. Instead, as I mentioned at the outset of chapter four, the second line stopped a few hundred yards away and Angela Kinlaw informed the crowd,

“Over there, that’s the former location of the white supremacist monument!”19 As the parade continued, we could have seen the top of the obelisk from our route had it still stood, but it didn’t, and no one seemed to look.

I approached a demonstrator who had been speaking familiarly with one of Take ’Em

Down NOLA’s founders, Michael “Quess?” Moore. I asked the demonstrator what he thought about the obelisk that was removed. He knitted his brows in a puzzled expression and I explained that the monument that was just taken down—the same one that inspired this second line—used to stand about a block away. He seemed both pleased and surprised.20

Somewhat bizarrely, the obelisk had to be imaginatively re-erected in Kinlaw’s speech for the gravity of its removal to be celebrated. That is, if the second line would not have stopped, and Kinlaw would not have pointed out where the Liberty Place Monument used to stand, it seems unlikely that residual memories of the absent obelisk could be fixed to its former location. City Hall’s plan not to replace the obelisk with some other commemorative architecture seems to be well founded historically speaking. Indeed, the original site of the

Liberty Place Monument on Canal Street was not mentioned during the second line at all.

190

When I visited the Canal intersection that used to hold the obelisk, the monument left no trace. The street improvements conducted in the early-1990s eliminated visible traces of the absent monument.

While I sat on the plinth of the Liberty Place Monument, I made eye contact with a young black man wearing the uniform of a cook and a black baseball cap with the symbol of an ankh on it. I hopped up and walked down the sidewalk to ask him what he thought about the obelisk being gone. He looked at me quizzically. I repeated, “you know, the racist obelisk?” With a shrug, he told me he’d heard of it. We shook hands and he walked away. As we departed, he turned around—still walking backwards—and shouted over the noise of traffic on Canal and calliope music from the river, “The obelisk is from Egypt!”21 It took me a second to register what he meant. But then the irony of stealing ancient African architectural designs to celebrate white supremacist violence and the suppression of black political power dawned on me.

The absence of the Liberty Place Monument combined with a lingering memory of its former existence opens up the possibilities for these kinds of exchanges. As the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy made clear, the violence represented by the Liberty Place

Monument as a symbol of racialized oppression that stood publicly in New Orleans for well over a century can still be evoked as evidence of structural inequality. There is no need for the obelisk to remain standing for such lessons to be learned. Similarly, as the Kimball’s spray paint and the “Lee Circle Forever” Mardi Gras beads show, activist memories of bygone monuments need not be progressive to linger. This fact is illustrated by the digital afterlives of such monuments.

191

As I pointed out above, Google Maps has not updated its street view image of the

Liberty Place Monument since January 2017. Even more surprising is that in February 2018, nine months after the obelisk was removed, I discovered that Google Maps had updated their page to list the monument as “Open 24 hours.” However, after selecting the “suggest an edit” feature, answering “yes” to the prompt “Place is permanently closed or has never existed” and then selecting the “Permanently closed” option, I learned just how easy it is to make adjustments to Google Maps. Within five minutes, Google sent me an email with the title

“Published: Your edit to Liberty Monument.”22 Clicking the link in their email, I visited the updated Liberty Monument page on Google Maps. With a few clicks of a mouse, the location is again listed as “Permanently closed.” To reinforce my edit, I took another step and submitted one of my pictures of the now vacant plinth. The picture I submitted of the monumental remains comes up if you search “Liberty Monument” on Google Maps.23 Of course, just as easily as I edited Google Maps, someone else can edit it back. The designation

“Permanently closed,” after all, does not accurately capture the removal of the monument. In other words, I would have preferred to select “Monument glorifying white supremacy forcibly removed by order of City Council,” but that wasn’t an option.

As this study makes clear, as long as public memories are performed through ritualized commemorative practices and architecture, memories will continue to be rhetorically resurrected or laid to rest. Buddy Bolden’s defleshed memory, the Murder Board as a cenotaphic memorial, Dillard University’s jazz funeral for Katrina, and Take ’Em Down

NOLA’s Second Line to Bury White Supremacy all attest to the flexibility of New Orleanian funerary practices for sustaining, maintaining, or displacing memories in public spaces.

Further, as the various interactions regarding the Liberty Place Monument considered in this

192 conclusion demonstrate, the relative presence of absent monumental memories—their residual anchoring to former sites—is subject to the rhetorical negotiation of committed communities. That is, the lingering potency of bygone memorials, and what their persuasive force will be directed toward, is rhetorically determined by the communities that engage them through commemorative action. It may very well be that commemorative spaces like the Liberty Place Monument will slowly recede to a point of memorial insignificance by virtue of sheer neglect. But as colloquial wisdom in New Orleans makes clear, buried memories, like anything buried in New Orleans’ watery soil, are liable to resurface at any moment in unexpected places and in unanticipated ways.

1 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument,’ French Quarter, New Orleans, 5:16pm, 5/6/2017.”

2 For examples of scholarship wrestling with the competing memories of New

Orleans see, Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1996); Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archaeology

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Kevin Fox Gotham, Authentic New Orleans:

Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy (New York: New York University Press, 2007);

Lynnell L. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical

Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); and Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass

Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

3 T.R. Johnson, “Ghost Music: Silence and Listening in the Post-Katrina Ninth

Ward,” Minnesota Review 84 (2015): 103.

4 Dawdy, 66.

5 Roach, 2.

193

6 Ramon Antonio Vargas, “2 Arrested, Accused of Spray Painting Pedestal of

Removed Beauregard Monument,” New Orleans Advocate May 17, 2017, http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/article_00de3322-3b1b-11e7- a755-af29b493eae3.html.

7 See Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New

Orleans Carnival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Roach.

8 Jarvis DeBerry, “Robert E. Lee Mardi Gras Beads are for Losers,” Times-Picayune

(New Orleans, LA), February 2, 2018, http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2018/02/forever_lee_circle_mardi_gras.html.

9 Hawes Spencer and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “White Nationalists March on University of Virginia,” New York Times, August 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/us/white-nationalists-rally-charlottesville- virginia.html.

10 I say “disposable” because a large quantity of Mardi Gras throws end up in the trash. For instance, the New Orleans Advocate reports that in January 2017, city workers vacuumed 93,000 pounds of Mardi Gras beads out of the city’s catch basin. Helen Freund,

“93,000 Pounds of Mardi Gras Beads Among Debris Removed During Citywide Catch Basin

Cleaning Project,” New Orleans Advocate, January 25, 2018, http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_eb3954f8-021a-11e8-aac1-

7f886b122b90.html.

11 Dawdy, 141.

12 Jeff Adelson, “New Orleans Confederate Monuments: Mitch Landrieu Reveals

Plans for Statues’ Future, Replacements, More,” New Orleans Advocate, May 18, 2017,

194

http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_5a907a62-3c40-11e7-82b4-

6343fdf146a6.html.

13 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument.’”

14 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument.’”

15 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument.’”

16 Fieldnotes, “State College, PA 16801, 11:35am, 5/10/2017.”

17 Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s

Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 37.

18 Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New

Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 4 (1999): 472-504; and Helen

A. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in New Orleans Second Line,” American

Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001): 752-777.

19 Italicized words are used to mark emphasis in the speech. Angela Kinlaw, audio recording of “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy,” May 7, 2017.

20 Fieldnotes, “State College, PA, 9:26am, 5/20/2017.”

21 Fieldnotes, “‘Liberty Monument.’”

22 Personal email correspondence with Google Maps. February 2, 2018.

23 The photo I uploaded to Google Maps can be found at the following link, goo.gl/EJkHB9.

195

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VITAE

J. David Maxson

Education: Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University, Communication Arts and Sciences, 2018 Advisor: Debra Hawhee Committee: Michele Kennerly, Stephen H. Browne, and Matthew Jordan

M.A. Indiana University, Bloomington, Communication and Culture, 2013

B.A. Drury University, Speech Communication and History, summa cum laude, 2010

Select Awards and Fellowships: Alumni Association Dissertation Award, Fine Arts and Humanities, Penn State, 2018.

CHI Predoctoral Fellowship, Center for Humanities and Information, Penn State, 2016-17.

Björn Bärnheim Research Fellowship, William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, 2015.

Global South Fellowship, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, Tulane University, 2015.

Sparks Fellowship, Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State, 2014-15.

Top Student Paper in American Culture Award, Popular/American Culture Association in the South, 2014.

First Year Teaching Award, Communication and Culture, Indiana University, 2012.

Select Publications: “‘The Woman Who Saved Football in Georgia’: A Rhetoric of Masculine Virtue and Spartan Motherhood,” in Sport and Militarism: Contemporary Global Perspectives ed. Michael L. Butterworth (New York: Routledge, 2017): 275-288. Print.

Review of Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along, by Gregory Clark. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2016): 194-197. Print.

“‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’: Jazz Funerals, Second Lines, and Laying Hurricane Katrina to Rest,” The Southern Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 185-203. Print.

Select Teaching Experience: Instructor, CAS 137H and CAS 138T: Rhetoric and Civic Life (Penn State) Instructor, CAS 422: Contemporary African American Communication (Penn State) Instructor, CAS 100A: Effective Speech Public Speaking Emphasis (Penn State) Instructor, CMCL-C205: Introduction to Communication and Culture (Indiana University)