![]() High property values might seem incongruous for a vice district, but since Storyville catered to the white male elite, money flowed through The District like muddy water through the banks of the mighty Mississippi River. ![]() Lest we think gentrification is a new phenomenon, rents in The District rose by as much as 1,500 percent after the ordinance, forcing out many of the long-time residents. By the early 1890s White was already madam of her own establishment.īefore the invention of Storyville – full of bordellos, bars and cabarets – the area was a working-class, largely Black neighborhood. While a 12-year-old sex worker would not have been unheard of during that period, it seems unlikely White would have found the meteoric success she enjoyed under those circumstances. Sometime in the early 1880s White moved to New Orleans and began working as a prostitute, throwing even her presumed birth year into question. Lulu White, Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans Jazz Museum Collectionĭetails about her early life are obscure, and that was at least partially by design: at various points in her process of self invention, White claimed to be from Jamaica and Cuba. And while her means, methods and goals contrasted starkly with those of the Selma marchers, as a woman of color White, too, defied the norms of a segregated society in a fierce and infamous bid for self determination. and other civil rights leaders marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in the fight for Black voting rights. Lulu White was born Lulu Hendley in 1868 in Selma, Alabama, just shy of 100 years before Martin Luther King, Jr. Lulu White with her dog circa 1893, Courtesy of the Collections of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. For the city’s most notorious turn-of-the-20th-century madam, dripping in diamonds and defiantly spinning her own ever-changing tale, that permissiveness was a resource to be harnessed and bent to her will. Something about the heady mix of influences– African, Caribbean, Native American and French – against a landscape of backwaters and bayous creates a culture of permissiveness where characters invent the most outlandish versions of themselves in ways that would be dismissed as implausible in fiction. In New Orleans, stories seem to seep out of the soggy ground.
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