New Orleans -- 1909

Marijuana

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February
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March 5 -- Sophie Wright Honored
March 12 -- N.O. to be Beautified
March 21 -- Old N.O. Dying
March 22 -- Artist ROBERT HOPKIN died
March 24 -- Trinity Episcopal Church Parish House Plans/Baptist Revival
March 29 -- QUEER FISH ARE SHRIMPS.
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April 3 -- Battleship
April 4 -- Pelicans
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April 23 -- New Line/JOHN T. MOORE dies
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May 23 -- Unionites Strike/Musician Charles F. Fischer born
May 26 -- Cotton
May 29 -- Sam Dutrey born
May 31 -- NEW ORLEANS LEADS TEAMS IN FIELDING
June 2 -- not so picturesque
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1June 8 -- 1st Car to N.O.
June 18 -- PHILADELPHIA-NEW ORLEANS SHIP LINE OPENING/Ray Bauduc born
June 19 -- Greater New Orleans Homestead/first Fathers Day
June 24 -- Artist John G. Kofler born
June 27 -- BRONSON AND REDMOND Boxing
June 28 -- Presdent Taft to Visit
July -- Kate and Jean Gordon, Social reformers and suffragists
July 3 -- LEON LING FLED TO NEW ORLEANS
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New Orleans Chapter of the American Institute of Architects
July 9 -- NEW ORLEANS SPENDS MONEY
July 13 -- Whitney Central National Bank Plans
July 14 -- DIE OF HEAT IN NEW ORLEANS
July 15 -- NEW ORLEANS BANK OFFICER ARRESTED/Heat Kills
July 18 -- Pelicans sixteen inning game
July 19 -- JACK LONDON STOPS AT NEW ORLEANS
July 22 -- IMPROVE STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS/Boxer Champion Jack Dupree born
July 27 -- NEW ORLEANS DOES HONOR TO FORAKER AND NEGRO EDITOR
July 31 -- WIRELESS FOR NEW ORLEANS.
August 1 -- CHICAGO TO NEW ORLEANS.
August 2 -- Fans Roast Local Club
August 4 -- Son of President of Nicaragua visits
August 6 -- Howard Librarian Finds Rare Volume/Hindu Cigarette sports cards
August 7 -- Frisco to Baton Rouge postponed/SPEEDWAY/buyers' convention
Le Théâtre St. Pierre
August 12 -- Boxing
August 13 -- Plans for new shipping line to West Indies and Europe/Carmen's Wages
August 14 -- New Tenor for French Opera
August 17 -- New Bonds for Railway and Light Company
August 18 -- Heat Wave
August 20 -- Racing Law
August 22 -- Crackers in N.O.
August 27 -- Musician Lester Young born/TELEGRAPHONE
August 28 -- New Mill/Boll Weevil
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September 2 -- Railroad connection that links the New Orleans to Houston
September 9 -- Street Name Changes/Kennedy Place
September 21 -- Hurricane/Audubon
September 22 -- Daily Picayune report on Hurricane
September 23 -- 55 storm victims
September 22 -- Metropolitan Bank Building plans
September 26 -- Cleveland Park
September 27 -- Hurricane Deaths Report
September 30 -- Parker Blake Co. plans
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October 2 -- Col. John M. Lee dies
October 3 -- Auto Race
October 5 -- COTTON PROSPECTS POOREST IN YEARS
October 6 -- Street Name Changes
October 9 -- Good Roads Convention
October 17 -- Cozy Cole born
October 21 -- Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills plans
October 22 -- N.O. prepares for President Taft's visit
October 30 -- Race/TAFT COCKTAILS
October 31 -- Taft arrives
November 1 -- Taft in French Quarter tand at Tulane
November 8 -- plans for Auto Track
November 9 -- Cotton Million Bales Less
November 10 -- Auto Show
November 16 -- Southern League
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November 18 -- CORRIGAN CONTROLLED NEW ORLEANS TRACK
November 21 -- Auto Race
November 22 -- Oldfield runs fast mile (auto)
November 23 -- Track Meet
November 29 -- Cotton
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1910 > ~The first reports of marijuana use in America: it appears in border towns in Texas and New Mexico and among blacks in New Orleans
http://cnparm.home.texas.net/Nat/USA/USA03.htm 
 
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“Ganja” use was next reported in 1909 in the port of New Orleans, in the black dominated “Storeyville” section frequented by sailors.

 

New Orleans’ Storeyville was filled with cabarets, brothels, music, and all the other usual accoutrements of “red light” districts the world over. Sailors from the islands took their shore leave and their marijuana there.

 

Blackface...

 

The Public Safety Commissioner of New Orleans wrote that, “marijuana was the most frightening and vicious drug ever to hit New Orleans,” and in 1910 warned that regular users might number as high as 200 in Storeyville alone.

 

To the DA and Public Safety Commissioners and New Orleans newspapers from 1910 through the 1930s, marijuana’s insidious evil influence apparently manifested itself in making the “darkies” think they were as good as “white men.”

 

In fact, marijuana was being blamed for the first refusals of black entertainers to wear blackface* and for hysterical laughter by “negroes” under marijuana’s influence when told to cross a street or go to the back of the trolley, etc.

 

*That’s right; your eyes have not deceived you. Because of a curious quirk in the “Jim Crow” (segregation) laws, black Americans were banned from any stage in the Deep South (and most other places in the North and West also). “Negroes” had to wear (through the 1920s) blackface - (like Al Jolson wore when he sang “Swanee”) - a dye which white entertainers wore to resemble or mimic black people. Actually, by “Jim Crow” law, blacks were not allowed on the stage at all, but because of their talent were allowed to sneak/enter through back doors, put on blackface, and pretend to be a white person playing the part of a black person...

 

…and all that Jazz

 

In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very powerful (popular) new “voodoo” music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music... jazz!

 

Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans racists’ fears of “voodoo” to try to keep whites out of their lives. Jazz’s birthplace is generally recognized to be Storeyville, New Orleans, home of original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson and others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis Armstrong* (1900).

 

*In 1930 - one year after Louis Armstrong recorded “Muggles” (read: “marijuana”) - he was arrested for a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles and put in jail for 10 days until he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.

 http://www.jackherer.com/chapter13.html

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The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States, in 1909, was in Storyville, the red light district of the port of New Orleans where Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 and is also regarded as the birthplace of Jazz. According to Ernest L.Abel: 'It was in these bordellos, where music provided the background and not the primary focus of attention, that marihuana became an integral part of the jazz era. Unlike booze, which dulled and incapacitated, marihuana enabled musicians whose job required them to play long into the night to forget their exhaustion. Moreover, the drug seemed to make their music sound more imaginative and unique, at least to those who played and listened while under its sensorial influence.'

The jazz and swing music associated with 'Negroes, Mexicans and entertainers' was declared to be an 'outgrowth of marihuana use'. Whites were concerned that itinerant black musicians were spreading a very powerful new 'voodoo' music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet in rhythm and that they also sold the evil weed that caused even the most respectable types to abandon their inhibitions. According to Harry Shapiro, 'In the early Twenties, marihuana, muggles, muta, gage, tea, reefer, grifa, Mary Warner, Mary Jane or rosa maria was known almost exclusively to musicians.'

Since smoking marihuana was associated with wild music and crazy behaviour - and with Negroes - the authorities moved quickly to stamp it out. From 1910 through to the end of the 1930's, New Orleans government officials and media conducted a vicious, racist press campaign that was to set an unseemly precedent for the anti-pot propaganda to come. New Orleans was first to ban the weed, in 1923, and all Louisiana followed suit in 1927. By the time that Prohibition (of alcohol) was repealed in 1933, seventeen States had banned cannabis.

http://www.ukcia.org/potculture/20/madness.html 

 

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The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States

The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States, in 1909, was in Storyville, the red light district of the port of New Orleans that is universally regarded as the birthplace of jazz. According to Ernest L.Abel: 'It was in these bordellos, where music provided the background and not the primary focus of attention, that marihuana became an integral part of the jazz era. Unlike booze, which dulled and incapacitated, marihuana enabled musicians whose job required them to play long into the night to forget their exhaustion. Moreover, the drug seemed to make their music sound more imaginative and unique, at least to those who played and listened while under its sensorial influence.' --Russ Cronin via http://www.ukcia.org/potculture/20/madness.html [Jul 2005]
 
http://www.jahsonic.com/1909.html