Re: Who are you?

Description: Growing up in New Orleans when the city was past its prime.

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: My name is Nicholas Lemann. I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and it shaped me a lot. I . . . My family has lived in Southern Louisiana since 1836. So I grew up in a place where I had very deep roots and a lot of . . . a small nuclear family but a large extended family and a very strong sense of place. So I grew up in . . . I was born several months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, so I really grew up during the Civil Rights era. And that had a big effect on me, particularly being in a Black majority city in the deep South. And I guess another thing that had an effect on me is even before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a declining city. Relative to other American big cities, New Orleans probably peaked in about 1850. In absolute terms it, you know, through most of my life has been a city with problems. So I watched the so called sunbelt phenomenon happen all around New Orleans, and watched New Orleans not be part of it.

Question: What did you think you’d be doing when you were young?

Transcript: I was one of those unusual Americans who was born . . . At the moment of my conception, probably my whole life had been mapped out for me. So my grandfather started a law firm in New Orleans which was, at the time I was born, a very prominent law firm. His two sons – my father and my uncle – were both partners in the law firm, and it was assumed that I would grow up and be a partner in this law firm, too. So that was kind of the life that was mapped out for me. My father has basically . . . Again this is rare in America. He’s 82. He’s lived his whole life in about a one-quarter mile radius in New Orleans. His closest friends are the people who were his closest friends when he was three or four years old. So that’s kind of the world I grew up in. I went to the same . . . I grew up in the same neighborhood my father had grown up in, surrounded by relatives. I went to . . . Every school I went to was the same my father had gone to, and I was sent there because he had gone there, and so on.

Recorded on: 11/30/07