Seventh Ward/Marigny

Sep 24

New Orleans’s Seventh Ward originally stretched from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain between Elysian Fields and Esplanade Avenue. The Seventh included neighborhoods like Lake Terrace Oaks and Filmore as well as parts of Gentilly to the Marigny, both of which overlap with the Eighth. The Seventh began as the Marigny––once a plantation owned by Bernard de Marigny, who sold it in the early nineteenth century when Marigny found himself in need of funds to pay off a debt. Selling primarily to free people of color, the neighborhood featured some of the oldest, most established Black communities in the country, after the Tremé. A host of influential African Americans have called the Seventh Ward home––from musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and Frank Ocean to activists like A. P. Tureaud to writers and academics like Fatima Shaik––as does Dillard University, a historically Black university with roots dating back to 1873.