NEW ORLEANS (press release) – The Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) and the New Orleans Public Library REACH Center (NOPL) will present “A New Door for My People: Black Life in Reconstruction-Era Louisiana” Saturday, March 22, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the NOPL REACH Center located on the third floor of Building C at the Corpus Christi Church Complex at 2022 St. Bernard Ave.
The free, half-day program will delve into lives of African Americans during Reconstruction (1865-1877), a period of immense transformation and hope following the Civil War. Moderated by Mark Roudané, whose great-great-grandfather co-founded The New Orleans Tribune, the event will feature insight from leading scholars including Justene Hill Edwards on the Freedman’s Bank, Tera Hunter on family reunification and William D. Jones on the Freedman’s Bureau and Home Colonies.
The Reconstruction era saw more than 330,000 African Americans in Louisiana transition from slavery to freedom. During this dynamic period, African Americans gained suffrage, held public office and helped draft one of the country’s most progressive state constitutions. Beyond politics, they reunited with families, built communities and established schools and churches. Hettie Pierce, a formerly enslaved woman from north Louisiana, described the time as a period of “big excitement” and said, “I knew that at last the good Lord had opened a new door for my people.”
“Reconstruction was a dynamic age when African American citizenship became an active reality rather than a deferred ideal,” said HNOC Family Historian Jari Honora. “African American men, armed with suffrage and newly elected to public office, helped draft and pass one of America’s most progressive Constitutions, which guaranteed equal access to public education and accommodations and broadened the privileges of citizenship for all. New doors also opened outside the statehouse—in towns, villages, and cities across Louisiana, as freedmen and women forged community; reunited with family separated during enslavement; established churches, schools, and fraternal organizations; and began saving for the future.”
Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Mellon New Directions Fellow, she is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (W.W. Norton. 2024), a comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company and its depositors. Always highlighting the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, Edwards studies the relationship between economic and political freedom for people of African descent in the United States.
Hunter is Edwards Professor of American History and chair of the African American Studies Department at Princeton University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and is the author of the award-winning To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997) and Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017).
Jones is a lecturer in the department of history at Sam Houston State University and earned his PhD from Rice University in 2020. His current book project focuses on survivors of the domestic slave trade to the lower Mississippi River valley. A 2022 recipient of HNOC’s Dianne Woest Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities, Jones’s work on slavery and Reconstruction has been featured in 64 Parishes and Louisiana History.
“A New Door for My People” is presented by HNOC in collaboration with NOPL and NOPL’s Reach Center.
Admission is free with registration at hnoc.org. Limited free parking is available on site and additional free street parking is available surrounding the REACH Center.
