Glad you wrote this article, Danny. About the behavior you and your girlfriend encounter all I can say is UGH.

Being from New Orleans, your article reminded me of two things about this city of my youth. I am forever nostalgic about my time in New Orleans, warts and all. So many warts- and your experiences are at the same time surprising and not surprising at all.

First, the schools there. My late husband went to a high school in Metairie, which during the early desegregation years of the late 1960's, went from a co-ed school to an all boy school. This happened, as you said, to keep the blacks away from the whites- meaning members of the opposite sex. I think the name of his high school was Grace King (my memory is shaky on this and he isn’t around to fact check). It was a huge school. My husband hated it and started taking Kung-fu classes because of all of the fighting in the halls (he was on the small side in his younger years of high school.) Everyone was beating the shit out of each other because there were no girls to focus on — at least that was his opinion.

My late husband and I got married in 1978. My husband was born in Canada and their birth certificates give ancestral origin instead of race so his b/c said Scottish/Irish under the heading of racial origin. My husband had very light blond hair and blue eyes but the day we went to get our marriage license we had a day long delay as we ran around downtown NOLA to get a judge to waive where it said Scottish on his b/c and to give us a paper that said my husband’s racial origin was white.

This was, of course, only a minor inconvenience in our day but after talking to a few clerks we learned this was a holdover of anti miscegenation laws that were meant to keep blacks and whites from marrying. We had to get that waiver because when the law changed from a black/white relationship being illegal and punishable by a year’s prison time and a monetary fine, the law that said a person’s race had to be listed as either white, black or mixed was never amended to reflect the changes.

I hope you will keep writing about your experiences.