New Orleans can't thrive as a city divided by race and income
John Biguenet
September 04, 2015 at 7:11 AM
... When I was a boy growing up in New Orleans, bumper stickers were still commonly displayed that declared, "Forget, Hell!" The rallying cry of recalcitrant Confederates even 100 years after the South's surrender, the slogan insisted that proud rebels remained unbowed in defeat. The romance of the Lost Cause flourished even as the thing forgotten was the cause itself: slavery ...
I am old enough to remember that Robert E. Lee Boulevard was Hibernia Avenue until the tumult over Brown vs. Board of Education unleashed the fury of segregationists, who wrapped themselves quite appropriately in the Confederate flag and lionized the heroes of the rebellion as symbols of their opposition to integration and equal rights.
Since those days of bitter racial strife, the population of New Orleans has shrunk from well over 600,000 to fewer than 500,000 in 2005 to under 400,000 today. White flight from integrated schools and public facilities explains some of that decline, but another factor may have been that those who stayed allowed two quite different cities to occupy the same crescent of the river.
The annual median household income of one of those cities is 54 percent lower than that of the other — and 20 percent lower than similar households nationally. The average citizen in the first town earns $25,000 a year, compared to a $60,000 median income for citizens of the other town. A large percentage of families in one of the cities — 44 percent, in fact — survive on less than $20,900 per year; in the second city, 30 percent of families bring home more than $105,000 each year. Nearly 60 percent of residents of one New Orleans feel their city has "mostly not recovered," while 78 percent of those who live in the other New Orleans believe the place is "mostly recovered" ...
http://www.nola.com/futureofneworleans/2015/09/confederate_monuments_new_orle.html
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