At the Corner of MLK and Jeff Davis

New Orleans, LA 2014-2018

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At the Corner of MLK and Jeff Davis

January 15th, 2018

The crescent shape of the city of New Orleans causes seemingly parallel roads to cross paths unexpectedly in the middle of the city like spokes in a jumbled wheel hub.  At one of these junctions in the Gert Town neighborhood lies a particularly precarious intersection, historically speaking: the meeting of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Parkway.  Streets whose respective namesakes honor the most revered leader of the Civil Rights Movement and the president of the Confederacy who sought to preserve the southern institution of slavery.  Both men spent time in New Orleans, with nearly a century spanned between their visits.

It seems absurd that a city can simultaneously pay honor to men that represent such opposing values and actions in their leadership, let alone have their names intersect.  In so many ways, this phenomenon is representative of New Orleans.  It is a place with a difficult and often contradictory history, with elements of which that all persist into the present. 

The combined length of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and  Jefferson Davis Pkwy is only about 4 miles, running from the Central City neighborhood to the neighborhood of Bayou St. John. I spent time photographing the length of each of these roads on different occasions while living in New Orleans, and the images in the series alternate between each street.  

The different neighborhoods along each street do differ in class, race and history, as many neighborhoods do from mile to mile in New Orleans, but the project doesn’t necessarily focus on these differences. Rather it aims to capture the people, their everyday lives and the community events that take place on these streets with such significant namesakes. To some degree, honorary street names and the memorials that dot their landscape can become commonplace, inanimate, and seemingly inconsequential background items. In conjunction with the city’s historical power structure and divided historical memory, this ‘everyday-ness’ of public tributes is likely how such a contradictory intersection continues to exist without much thought. It persists even at a time when the city was publicly debating the removal of several Confederate monuments, one of which was a Jefferson Davis monument on Jefferson Davis Parkway. Paradoxically, on the very same thoroughfare named after the Confederacy’s only president sits Xavier University, the renowned historically Black Catholic university, the only one of its kind in the nation.

Which poses the question: what symbolic or tangible effect do these street names and monuments have on the psyche of the communities that live and meet along them? Pride, disdain, indifference, defiance?

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