Musician Glen David Andrews is "king of the Money Wasters Social, Aid & Pleasure Club" at a second line parade in New Orleans. Image by Sausalito photographer Michelle Elmore.
If you watched the dramatic rooftop rescues and the Superdome suffering in New Orleans after Katrina struck and thought, "I had no idea there were so many black people there," you were hardly alone.
I heard that notion expressed several times during the televised disaster, which I scrutinized helplessly as a copy editor in San Mateo. In 2005, most people only had a Disneyfied impression of the tourist-dependent Gulf city, and most visitors barely left the orbit of Bourbon Street except to access the airport.
Tonight the medium that is the message will return to the story of race in the Crescent City when "Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans" is broadcast on KQED. The film won an award at last year's San Francisco International Film Festival.
The documentary debuts at 11 p.m., and there are several encores if you can't tune in today. A list of showtimes is on the film's Web site; here are the Bay Area broadcast details:
KQED, 11 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19
KQED, 5 a.m. Friday, Feb. 20
KQED Life, 10 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20
KQED Life, 4 a.m. Saturday, Feb 21
KQED World, 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21
KTEH Life, 10 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20
KTEH Life, 4 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 21
In a nutshell, the Treme (pronounced "Trem-EE") is a tiny neighborhood next to the French Quarter that was home to perhaps the earliest "free" black community in America. It was a center of civil rights activity a century ago and incubated the jazz scene that eventually swept the world.
The area was commercially devastated when an interstate highway displaced its small-business boulevard, and later by the crack epidemic, not unlike San Francisco's historic black neighborhood the Fillmore, which nurtured jazz on the Left Coast.
There, urban renewal famously shattered the community when Geary Boulevard expanded, and housing projects replaced apartment buildings. Yet in New Orleans, of course, Hurricane Katrina also blew through town, giving disaster a whole new meaning for buffeted residents.
As the documentary film's co-director Dawn Logsdon said in a recent interview: "The present is a disaster, the future's all up in the air. It's like, 'Let's turn to our past and at least draw some lessons from it,' and I think also some inspiration and hope."
Check out the trailer:
Hearing the Rebirth Brass Band blast "Take it to the Street" is about all you need to feel the continuing vitality of the Treme despite all its challenges.
The Treme, as I wrote in December after visiting the city, "happens to be the setting for the next TV series by the creators of The Wire.
"The show, which I'm told starts production in February, will feature Wire alum Wendell Pierce, who my partner, Bea, and I saw do a second-line dance during an Irvin Mayfield concert in the Marigny neighborhood, a hot spot for live music in today's New Orleans."
This blog post is twinned with my entry on Examiner.com.
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