Celebrate Black History with HNOC

Founder Al Jackson’s scholarship and personal history come together in Treme’s Petit Jazz Museum.

Coffee maven Rose Nicaud declared that “everybody takes coffee at my stand,” regardless of race. After a man was shot near her stand, she entered the roiling Reconstruction-era debate over the limits of integration.

With a Louisiana redistricting case on the Supreme Court’s 2025–26 docket, the Voting Rights Act is once again under scrutiny. It’s not the first time Louisiana has tested the boundaries of the franchise.

New research about New Orleans’s famed coffee seller shows both the precariousness and the possibilities of urban enslavement.

As the 1961 Freedom Rides transfixed the nation, New Orleans civil rights activists played a crucial role.

Shortly after Robert Francis Prevost was announced as the first American pope, HNOC’s Jari C. Honora uncovered a surprising New Orleans connection, revealing the pontiff’s maternal grandparents to be Creoles of color from the Seventh Ward. 

In an excerpt from his new memoir, activist Larry Bagneris recounts how his adolescent struggle to shed his homosexuality led to a political awakening and a lifelong purpose.

What can we learn about portrayals of the “other” from the first known Black American opera?

Along with food and music, fashion was used by Louisiana Creoles to declare and express their unique identity.

HNOC acquired an original copy of the infamous image that took Civil War-era America by storm, quickly becoming a tool of the abolitionist cause.

This stylish menu from a restaurant in a former plantation home belies the site’s dark history of human enslavement.

Smith documented the music, parading, and Black folk traditions of New Orleans for decades.

Ory and his trombone helped shape jazz from the 1920s onward. His papers include photographs, correspondence, sheet music, instruments, and more.

A post-segregation sibling to the Green Book, this directory compiled information on Black-owned businesses across the country.

HNOC’s largest collection related to New Orleans jazz was the life’s work of this prolific collector, producer, historian, and photographer.

The New Orleans percussionist's audio and video tape collection documents his decades-long career, his musical influences, landmark events in the city, and his family and daily life.

A rare collection of manuscript essays and family correspondence offers a thrilling look at one of the most influential people in the early struggle for African American civil rights in Louisiana.

For decades, studio photographer John E. Kuhlman spent his free time taking pictures of jazz musicians. HNOC is now home to that part of his archive.

by Larry Bagneris

by John H. Lawrence
with a foreword by Jeff L. Rosenheim

by Judy Cooper

by Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards, and Nick Weldon

by Fatima Shaik

translated and introduced by Clint Bruce
with a foreword by Angel Adams Parham

by Danny Barker
edited by Alyn Shipton, with an introduction by Gwen Thompkins

by Harold R. Battiste Jr. with Karen Celestan

with essays by Jason Berry, Dan Cameron, John H. Lawrence, and Jude Solomon