The City’s Beach, Run by the People
Pandemic unemployment and other factors inspired “Sage” Michael Pellet to spearhead the clean-up of a Jim Crow-era beach in New Orleans that various arms of government have owned and neglected for six decades. (The beach was closed following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made segregated spaces illegal. It has never officially reopened.) For Pellet, this was initially a Black heritage move. But this beach has been used continuously, even as demographics have shifted over the decades. How do people negotiate space, when there is no overarching authority? And what might the same space mean to different people? What responsibility and role does the city, the current “owner” of the space, bear in all of this? This story is part of Places Journal’s “Writing the City” series. It was reported this story over three years, from 2020-2023.
United We Stand, Divided We Dance: Wilcox County Proms in Black and White
In April 2009, the public high school in Wilcox County, Georgia still held racially-segregated proms. (This was my thesis project for Columbia University School of Journalism. Parts of it have been published in Buzzfeed and elsewhere.)