New Orleans Massacre Of 1866

The violence was prepared in the days before. On July 27, 1866, about 200 Black supporters of the reconvened constitutional convention, many of them war veterans, met at the Mechanics Institute and heard Anthony Dostie and former governor Michael Hahn. Armed white men, mostly ex-Confederate Democrats, gathered at Common and Dryades streets. Mayor John T. Monroe, a Confederate supporter reinstated that May, drew a Harper's Weekly charge that his proclamation was a covert invitation to riot. The official count was 38 dead, 34 of them Black; one historian puts the Black dead at 40 to 50.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.4 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 — 0.4 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.5 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• Congo Square — 0.5 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• New Orleans Slave Depot — steps away
• The Pythian Temple — 0.2 mi
• America's First Movie Theater / Vitascope Hall — 0.2 mi
• The Birthplace of "Dixie" — 0.3 mi