Digitally Mapping the North Claiborne Corridor: Reconstructing Black Resistance, Place-Making, and Cultural Memory in New Orleans, 1865-1965

Anna Livia Brand
Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
UC Berkeley

This project creates an interactive digital humanities platform mapping New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue corridor from 1865-1965, documenting one of the nation’s most significant sites of African American resistance, cultural production, and place-making. North Claiborne served as the commercial and cultural heart of America’s first African American neighborhood before the I-10 expressway construction decimated this thriving corridor in the 1960s. By focusing on four critical years—1865 (Emancipation), 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson), 1945 (post-WWII), and 1965 (highway construction)—this project traces how Black communities claimed and transformed urban space across shifting regimes of racial capitalism. Working with community partners, we will create an ArcGIS-based platform integrating georeferenced historical maps with multimedia materials including archival photographs, oral histories, sound recordings, and historical documents. The interactive map will richly document businesses, residences, cultural institutions, and civil rights sites along a 22-block stretch between Canal Street and Elysian Fields, revealing the intrinsically intertwined histories of jazz innovation, Black entrepreneurship, and political organizing. This platform will serve multiple constituencies—scholars, educators, and community members—as both a research tool and living archive, supporting ongoing struggles for social and spatial justice.