Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard

Two months before Greensboro, a 21-year-old woman organized sit-ins at Canal Street lunch counters. Oretha Castle Haley led the New Orleans chapter of CORE through nonviolent direct action campaigns across the city in 1960, wielding nonviolence as strategy in a port city that had been the largest in the South at the start of the Civil War. The boulevard renamed for her in 1989 was once Dryades Street, the commercial spine of the Black Central City neighborhood. What you walk now is anchored by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center and the Southern Food & Beverage Museum — culture-led reinvestment made visible in storefronts and foot traffic. The street's revitalization is one of the most visible examples of that model in New Orleans. You can reach it from the St. Charles Avenue streetcar at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a transit line that connects the city's layered eras in real time: antebellum mansions, streetcar tracks laid before the automobile, and a boulevard named for a woman who was 21 when she decided lunch counters were worth sitting at until they opened.