Mahalia Jackson

Her birth year is uncertain: her certificate says 1911 and her aunts said 1912. Mahalia Jackson grew up poor on Water Street in the Sixteenth Ward with Aunt Duke, worshipping at Plymouth Rock Baptist and Mount Moriah Baptist. In Chicago, Thomas A. Dorsey trained her and used her to sell his sheet music. Her 1947 record Move On Up a Little Higher sold about two million copies. She refused to record the blues and turned down offers from Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. At the March on Washington she called out, Tell 'em about the dream, Martin.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.5 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Sicilian Immigration to Louisiana - 1891 Massacre and Lynching of Italians — steps away
• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — steps away
• Sidney Joseph Bechet — steps away