Distribution of blacks as a percent of the population and
The issue of slavery remains near the surface of U.S. life. In New Orleans, the city's school board has a policy of dropping slave-owner names from public schools. The George Washington school was renamed Charles Dew, a pioneering black doctor who urged the army to stop segregating blood by race. George Washington (who in the 1790s was far more enlightened than most slave owners: he freed his slaves in his will) is the latest in a string of name changes, 22 since the policy took hold in 1993. Although confederate names still appear on statutes and streets throughout the city, Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Davis Jefferson are gone from school walls. The city's pubic schools are 90.3 percent black; yet, out of 121 schools, 49 were originally named after slave owners. Next, the school board wants to purge the names of four mixed-race New Orleanians who owned slaves despite being part-black themselves.
Distribution of blacks as a percent of the population and | median family income by block groups in New Orleans, Louisiana. |
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Of New Orleans' 1.3 million people in 1990, 25 percent of households had incomes of over $50,000 and another 25 percent had incomes under $15,000. These poorest of the poor are overwhelming black and Latino (some 28 percent of whom have not completed high school compared with 14 percent of whites).
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Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 20 November 1996; last revised 09 March 2005.
