Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

Top: Allen Toussaint.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL P. SMITH ©THE HISTORIC NEW
ORLEANS COLLECTION, 2007.0103.4.750.
Below: Oretha Castle Haley.
LOUISIANA WEEKLY COLLECTION, AMISTAD RESEARCH
CENTER.
led by “Big Chief Jolly” (George Landry). He worked
with his nephews Art and Cyril Neville of The
Meters and Charles and Aaron of the Neville
Brothers. He began collaborating with national figures
Glen Campbell, Paul McCartney, and The
Pointer Sisters. He served as musical director of the
New York run of Stagerlee. By 1984 author Rhodes
Spedale, Jr., could write, “For someone self-taught,
he has risen to the top of his chosen field. There is
no better success story; for his is an artistic as well as
commercially successful career.” 1
Hurricane Katrina drove Toussaint from New
Orleans to New York for five years, but he returned
to continue, mainly as a performer in demand
around the globe. He died unexpectedly in 2015,
shortly after a performance in Madrid, Spain.
Shocked New Orleanians paid their respects by the
thousands, whether in person or at home reflecting
on the brilliance, character, kindness, and creativity of one of their own.
Rhodes Spedale, Jr. A Guide to Jazz in New Orleans. (New Orleans: Hope Publications, 1984), 269.
O RETHA C ASTLE H ALEY
(1939-1987)
At the age of twenty Oretha Castle Haley participated in the first sit-ins at New Orleans Canal
Street stores. She had graduated from Joseph S. Clark High School in New Orleans, and was
attending Southern University of New Orleans. Equally important, she was a member of Mount
Zion Baptist Church led by civil rights leader the Reverend A. L. Davis. 1 Haley was attacking segregation
of public accommodations for a cause that went back to the efforts of Louis Charles
Roudanez (q.v.) a century earlier.
The picketing of lunch counters across eastern America seems to have begun in late 1959. With
their prominence and popular lunch counters, Woolworth and other five-and dime stores were favorite
national targets, the response in Boston, Princeton, and elsewhere being predictably hostile. The first
blow in New Orleans came on September 17, 1960, when college students Haley, Rudy Lombard,
Cecil Carter, Jr., and Sidney Goldfinch, Jr. were arrested at McCrory’s lunch counter. 2 They were convicted
of trespass and other “crimes” thus generating the 1963 decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in
Lombard, et al v. Louisiana that disallowed state and city efforts to maintain segregation in places of
public accommodation. Shortly after this initiative Haley helped found the local chapter of the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Haley rose rapidly in the ranks of CORE, first as a recruiter in Louisiana cities, before becoming
a state coordinator. Back in New Orleans she took on City Hall, specifically the New Orleans
Recreation Department, that notable achievement of Mayor deLesseps Morrison (q.v.). It practiced
the segregation that she helped to end. Haley then moved into electoral politics, becoming a leader
of the Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD) in 1970, and working in the political
campaigns of former legislator Dorothy Mae Taylor. She then went to work as Deputy Director of
Charity Hospital, where one of her achievements was helping to establish the New Orleans Sickle
Cell Anemia Foundation. She married another civil rights leader Richard Haley and had four sons.
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