Wendell Pierce

How are there no answers?

It was.

I called Pontchartrain Park the Black Mayberry, you know.

It grew out of the civil rights movement when there was so many prohibitions and where blacks could not participate in the expansion of post-World War II, you know, suburbia.

And there was a movement to make sure that black folks had access to homes and all.

And Puncher Train Park came out of sort of an appeasement, a

It was separate but equal, adjacent to Gentilly Woods, which was a white neighborhood with the covenant of blacks couldn't move in.

And they set aside another 200 acres and replicated that neighborhood in Pontchartrain Park.

But right in the middle of it, Joseph Bartholomew designed a golf course, a little municipal golf course.

And Joseph Bartholomew was an African-American landscape architect.

who designed most of the courses in New Orleans at the time, but couldn't play on them.

So it was the yin and yang of fighting the ignorance of Jim Crow segregated New Orleans, but at the same time creating pockets of idyllic communities.

And Puncher Train Park was one of them.

And lawyers and doctors and teachers and...

Janitors and the glass man, Mr. Wagner, was a glass man.

And Mr. Greenwood was the dry cleaner.

So it was economic development and everybody's, your mother and father and the playground there at Southern University at New Orleans, a historic black college right in the neighborhood.

So it was really, really idyllic.

And she taught two blocks from our home at Cog Hill Elementary School where I went to elementary school.

And for years I was just known as Mrs. Pierce's son because she was so beloved in the neighborhood and she was a part of the community.