Small as it is, the Tremé is the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, a community that has shaped American culture to a degree entirely out of proportion to its geographic footprint. The Tremé — named for Claude Tremé, the French planter who subdivided his estate in the 1790s — became home to the largest community of free people of color in the antebellum South. By 1850, New Orleans had more than ten thousand free Black residents, many of them Creoles of color with French names, French educations, and French culture who occupied a unique middle position in the city's rigid racial hierarchy.
They owned property, operated businesses, educated their children at private schools, and patronized the arts. Many sent their children to Paris for education. They built the churches, the mutual aid societies, and the musical traditions that became the Tremé's identity.
After emancipation, the neighborhood absorbed freedpeople from the surrounding countryside and became the heart of Black New Orleans. The second-line parade tradition — brass bands leading a procession through the streets every Sunday, with neighborhood clubs and ordinary citizens dancing behind — was born and maintained here. Jazz musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, social aid and pleasure clubs: the cultural institutions that define Black New Orleans remain alive in the Tremé today.