News Release

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New Orleans before, after Katrina 
to be topic of UNC exhibit, discussion

CHAPEL HILL – New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina will be the topic of an exhibit opening and informal discussion Tuesday (March 7) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Triangle residents who lost their homes in the city during last year’s devastating hurricane will be among participants in the 5:45 p.m. discussion in Wilson Library. The exhibit will open with a reception at 5 p.m. in the library’s manuscripts reading room. Both will be free and open to the public.

The exhibit, "The City that Care Forgot: The Southern Remembers New Orleans, 1800-2006," takes its subtitle from the sources of materials to be displayed: Wilson’s Southern Historical and Southern Folklife collections.

Open through July 31, the exhibit will feature more than 30 letters, diaries, music recordings and photographs that trace the history of New Orleans. Items displayed will include:

• A letter that U.S. Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson wrote before the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, fought because troops had not yet received news that a treaty had ended the War of 1812 two weeks earlier.
• An 1841 recipe for New Orleans gumbo soup.
• Photographs of street musicians in the city’s French Quarter.
• Oral histories from the city’s last white mayor, Moon Landrieu, and first black mayor, Ernest Morial.
• Commercial sound recordings by jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, soul singer and songwriter Irma Thomas, funk band The Meters, pop artists The Neville Brothers and Fats Domino, and others.

Listening stations will allow visitors to hear the exhibit’s oral histories and music selections.

Participants in the 5:45 p.m. discussion Tuesday will include UNC English professors Dr. Connie Eble, who grew up in New Orleans, and Dr. Ruth Salvaggio, who lost her home there to Katrina; Ferrel Guillory, who grew up in Baton Rouge and directs UNC’s program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life; New Orleans native Laura C. Brown of the manuscripts department in Wilson Library, who curated the exhibit, and her parents, Michael and Mary Clark.

The exhibit is a way for Brown to remember the city in which she spent the first 26 years of her life. Her mother, father, brother and grandmother lived in New Orleans until Katrina forced them to relocate to the Triangle.

"I really was emotionally devastated by Katrina, because New Orleans is my hometown and has so much meaning to me," Brown said.

The exhibit will touch on themes evident throughout the city’s past – food, Mardi Gras, music, race relations and political corruption.

"We’re sort of showing it warts and all, but that’s what the city is – its faults are the things that make it unlike any other American city," Brown said. "The exhibit shows what the city was and how we can remember it in our archival repository."

The exhibit will be open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. For more information, call (919) 962-1345.

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(Kelly Ochs, a senior journalism and mass communication major from Winston-Salem, wrote this release for UNC News Services.)

Photo URL: To download a photo of an unidentified man on the Mississippi River levee, taken on May 4, 1927, go to http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/1184_PA_v03_01recropped.jpg.

Wilson Library contact: Laura C. Brown, (919) 962-1345 or ljcb@email.unc.edu

News Services contact: Print, L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589