The African-American Heritage Trail is a meandering history lesson stretching from Shreveport, La., to New Orleans, said Ron Stodghill in The New York Times. As the trail wends its way through 26 museums, marketplaces, and cemeteries, its “heaping gumbo-style portions” of history are not always easy to digest. “But if you can hang in there,” you will learn that the African-American culture that developed in spite of slavery was even more tenacious than that abominable institution.
New Orleans is the trail’s logical starting point because “one of the oldest, richest strains of African-American culture” finds its roots in the northern fringe of the French Quarter. Tremé is “the nation’s oldest surviving black community.” Many light-skinned people of color lived here, ascending the social ladder through quadroon balls. Its centerpiece, St. Augustine Catholic Church, was among the first Southern churches to be integrated.
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