How New Orleans soldiered through struggle and gave rap its bounce
As it celebrates its 50th birthday, we are mapping hip-hop's story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture. Click here to see the entire list.
On June 11, 1864, Black New Orleanians paraded through their city, cheering, singing and strutting. Though the Civil War was still raging, the throngs recognized the minor victory in Louisiana, a pillar of the South's brutal plantation economy, abolishing slavery in its new constitution a month earlier. The jamboree became one of the Crescent City's earliest second lines, a homegrown tradition of treating hardship as a license to flood the streets with buoyant bodies and exuberant music. Over the next century-plus, despite Jim Crow, lynchings and hurricanes, the people of the Big Easy kept joyfully reveling in
