New Orleans History Timeline: Code Noir to Consent Decree

New Orleans has lived under five governing regimes since 1718, and the political and legal events in its history timeline run from a French colonial council applying the Custom of Paris, through a Spanish code that let enslaved people buy their freedom, through Reconstruction massacres, Plessy v. Ferguson, machine politics, Huey Long, Hurricane Katrina litigation, and a sitting mayor’s federal indictment in 2025. The thread connecting them is a city whose laws, racial order, and government structure have been rewritten repeatedly, often under force.

French Founding and the Code Noir (1718–1762)

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718 on a bend of the Mississippi River, on land the Choctaw called Bulbancha, meaning “Land of Many Tongues.”¹ It became the capital of Louisiana in 1722 and was managed first by the Compagnie d’Occident, a private trading monopoly, until the French Crown took direct control in 1731.²

Governance ran through the Superior Council, created in 1719. Its nine members served as investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge at once, applying the 362 articles of the Custom of Paris.² Executive power was split between a governor over military affairs and a commissaire ordonnateur over finances, and the two officials often clashed.

France imposed the Code Noir on Louisiana in 1724. The 54-article decree required Roman Catholic baptism of enslaved people, prohibited interracial marriage, set escalating punishments for runaways including ear-cropping, branding with a fleur-de-lis, and death, and required Superior Council approval before any slaveholder could grant freedom.³ By 1766, more than 44 percent of the city’s roughly 3,000 residents were enslaved people of African descent.⁴ Records of free people of color appear as early as 1722, with militia service and individual manumission as early paths to freedom.¹

Spanish Rule, the 1768 Revolt, and the Cabildo (1762–1803)

Louis XV secretly ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762 through the Treaty of Fontainebleau. The transfer was not announced in New Orleans until October 1764, and the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, did not arrive until March 1766.⁵ French Creole merchants and planters, resentful of Spanish trade rules and Ulloa’s efforts to weaken the Superior Council, revolted in 1768. Attorney general Nicolas de Lafrénière used the council to declare Ulloa’s authority illegitimate, and armed marchers forced the governor to flee to Cuba on October 28.⁶

Spain’s answer arrived in August 1769. Lieutenant General Alejandro O’Reilly landed with 2,000 troops aboard twenty ships. He executed six conspirators, imprisoned six more, abolished the Superior Council, and replaced it with a nine-member Cabildo combining legislative and judicial functions.⁵⁶⁷

Spanish law reshaped the city’s racial order. The O’Reilly Code banned Native enslavement and introduced coartación, the legal right of enslaved people to own property, earn wages, and purchase their own freedom. It also allowed formal complaints against abusive slaveholders.⁶ The free population of color grew sharply. By one estimate, a quarter of the houses along main streets in New Orleans were eventually owned by free people of color.⁸

Louisiana Purchase and the Civil-Law Decision (1803–1812)

Spain returned Louisiana to France in 1800, and in 1803 Napoleon sold it to the United States for roughly $15 million. The acquisition raised an immediate question: how to fit a French Catholic city with a civilian legal tradition into a common-law country.⁹ William C.C. Claiborne was appointed territorial governor. Louisiana ultimately kept its civil law tradition, codifying it in the 1825 Code Civil, which still distinguishes its legal system from every other state’s.

The American transition also hardened racial law. The 1806 Black Codes dropped Spanish-era protections, kept harsh punishments, and stated that free people of color should “never presume to conceive themselves equal to the white.”¹⁰

The 1811 German Coast Uprising

On January 8, 1811, the largest organized rebellion of enslaved people on American soil began just upriver from New Orleans. Led by Charles Deslondes, more than 200 enslaved men rose up at Colonel Manuel Andry’s plantation near present-day LaPlace and marched over 22 miles downriver, burning five buildings.¹¹ Troops under General Wade Hampton intercepted them near modern-day Kenner on January 10.¹²

A tribunal convened at Destrehan Plantation on January 13. Sixty-seven enslaved people were tried across three proceedings. Those sentenced to death were executed by firing squad and beheaded, and their heads were displayed on poles along the river road as a warning.¹¹ The revolt prompted more restrictive laws for both enslaved and free Black people across the region.

The Antebellum Three-Tiered Order

Between the planter class and enslaved laborers, New Orleans supported a legally distinct community of free people of color larger and more prosperous than in any other American city. At its peak, the city had the highest percentage of free Black men employed as artisans, professionals, and entrepreneurs in the country. Merchant Bernard Soulié was worth $100,000, and philanthropist Thomy Lafon amassed $500,000.⁸

That status eroded after 1830. By 1855, free people of color were banned from forming new organizations. By 1857, emancipation was outlawed entirely, and individuals had to carry freedom papers at all times.⁸

Reconstruction Violence (1866–1877)

The 1866 Mechanics Institute Massacre

On July 30, 1866, Radical Republicans reconvened the 1864 Louisiana Constitutional Convention at the Mechanics Institute to extend voting rights to freedmen and disenfranchise former Confederates. Mayor John T. Monroe, a Confederate sympathizer, declared the gathering unlawful, and Sheriff Harry T. Hays, a former Confederate general, deputized a posse of ex-Confederates to break it up.¹³

When roughly 200 unarmed Black veterans marched toward the Institute in support, police and an armed mob attacked. The violence killed 34 Black supporters and 3 convention delegates and wounded more than 130.¹³ General Phil Sheridan reported to the War Department that it was an “absolute massacre” committed by the police. Along with a similar massacre in Memphis two months earlier, it turned Northern opinion against President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, tipped the fall congressional elections to Radical Republicans, and led to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.¹⁴

Pinchback and the Battle of Liberty Place

Congress required Louisiana to adopt a new constitution with equal-rights provisions as a condition of readmission. The 1867–1868 convention seated an equal number of Black and white delegates. P.B.S. Pinchback, a delegate who helped draft its civil rights article, was elected to the state senate in 1868. On December 9, 1872, he became the first Black governor of any American state, serving as acting governor after the impeachment of Henry Clay Warmoth.¹⁵

White paramilitary groups answered with organized violence. The April 1873 Colfax Massacre killed between 80 and 100 Black people.¹⁵ On September 14, 1874, the White League staged an armed insurrection on Canal Street known as the Battle of Liberty Place. Roughly 4,000 Metropolitan Police and state militia under former Confederate General James Longstreet faced White League forces under former Confederate General Frederick N. Ogden. The battle killed 32 people. The White League held New Orleans for three days until federal troops and warships restored Governor William Pitt Kellogg.¹⁶ Historians view the episode as a turning point that signaled the collapse of Reconstruction in Louisiana and set up the disenfranchisement of Black voters by 1898.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1890–1896)

In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act, requiring segregated railway coaches. A New Orleans Citizens’ Committee formed in 1891 to challenge it, hiring attorney Albion Tourgée and selecting Homer Plessy, a man of seven-eighths white and one-eighth African American descent, as the test plaintiff. On June 7, 1892, Plessy sat in a white-only compartment on the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans and was arrested.¹⁷

Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against Plessy, and the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the law. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” public facilities were constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority that enforced racial separation did not imply inferiority. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone, writing that the Constitution “is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”¹⁸ The decision supplied constitutional cover for Jim Crow segregation across the South and remained in force until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.¹⁷

The Old Regulars and Boss Behrman (1897–1946)

New Orleans entered the twentieth century under one of America’s most entrenched political machines. The Regular Democratic Organization, the “Old Regulars,” was founded in 1874 and ran the city through 17 ward bosses who controlled patronage and endorsements.¹⁹ Martin Behrman organized the Choctaw Club in 1897 as its headquarters, modeled on Tammany Hall.²⁰

Behrman became the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history, holding office from 1904 to 1920 and again from 1925 until his death in January 1926. His administration built the Public Belt Railroad, expanded sewerage and water systems, and pushed through the 1912 City Charter that restructured government into a commission form. Critics accused him of steering contracts to allies, and opponents alleged voter fraud in his 1904 election.²⁰ The Old Regulars’ grip held until 1946, when reform candidate deLesseps “Chep” Morrison defeated the machine’s mayoral candidate.¹⁹

Huey Long Against the City (1928–1935)

Governor Huey P. Long’s rise effectively created two parties within Louisiana: Long and his followers against the anti-Longs, a coalition of fiscal conservatives and Old Regular machine allies.²¹ In 1929, the Louisiana House impeached Long on 19 corruption articles, but the effort collapsed after 15 state senators pledged not to convict.²²

Long retaliated by purging legislative committees, firing the friends and family of opponents from state jobs, and canceling projects earmarked for New Orleans. He deployed the National Guard to raid the city’s gambling and prostitution operations and seized the cash.²² His populist program also produced nearly 13,000 miles of new roads, free textbooks for schoolchildren, more funding for the Port of New Orleans, and the LSU Medical School alongside an expanded Charity Hospital system.²¹ His assassination in 1935 closed the era, but the split between populist and establishment factions continued to define Louisiana politics for decades.

School Desegregation (1960–1963)

After Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, the Orleans Parish School Board spent six years resisting. Federal district judge J. Skelly Wright repeatedly rejected delay tactics and threatened to jail state legislators who tried to block desegregation.²³

On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked into William J. Frantz Elementary School escorted by federal marshals. Three other first-graders, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost, integrated McDonogh No. 19 Elementary the same day.²⁴ White parents organized boycotts. Bridges’ father was fired, and the family was barred from a local grocery store. Between January and May 1961, Bridges was the only student in her classroom, because every white family had pulled their children out.²³

White flight followed. The Black share of the city’s population rose from 37 percent in 1960 to 55 percent by 1980, and within a decade more than 70 percent of public school students were Black. Tulane University, segregated for 129 years, enrolled its first Black students in February 1963 after a lawsuit challenging the school’s private status.²⁴

Hurricane Katrina and the Levee Litigation (2005)

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 storm. The Hurricane Protection System, maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, failed in roughly 50 locations. By August 31, 80 percent of the city was underwater. Floodwaters were not cleared until October 11.²⁵ Investigators found that some breaches occurred not because waters exceeded design capacity but because of foundation failures, inconsistent material quality, and subsidence. Regional Corps engineers had raised concerns about certain designs, but the New Orleans district office cited “engineering judgment” and did not pursue them.²⁶

More than 70,000 claims were filed against the Army Corps, including a $200 billion claim by the State of Louisiana and a $77 billion claim by the City of New Orleans.²⁵ The federal government invoked the discretionary function exception of the Federal Tort Claims Act and the Flood Control Act of 1928, which provides that “no liability of any kind” shall attach to the United States for damages from floods related to federal flood control projects. In St. Bernard Parish Government v. United States, the Court of Federal Claims initially found the government liable for a temporary taking tied to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet channel, but the Federal Circuit reversed in 2018, ruling that the government could not be held liable for inaction and that the plaintiffs failed to prove MRGO caused the flooding.²⁷

Danziger Bridge and the NOPD Consent Decree (2005–2025)

Six days after Katrina landfall, on September 4, 2005, New Orleans police officers opened fire on unarmed civilians crossing the Danziger Bridge. Seventeen-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison were killed, and four others were seriously wounded.²⁸ Officers then conspired to cover up the shootings by planting a gun, fabricating witnesses, and falsifying reports. Ronald Madison’s brother, Lance, was falsely charged with attempting to kill police and jailed for three weeks before a state grand jury declined to indict.²⁹

In 2011, five officers were convicted at trial on federal civil rights and obstruction charges. April 2012 sentences ranged from 6 years for Sergeant Arthur “Archie” Kaufman, who led the cover-up, to 65 years for Robert Faulcon. Five more officers who pleaded guilty and cooperated received sentences between 3 and 8 years.²⁸

The case was among the revelations that led then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu to invite a Department of Justice investigation into the NOPD in May 2010. The DOJ’s March 2011 report found patterns of unconstitutional, racially biased policing. In July 2012, the city entered a federal consent decree described as the most expansive in the nation, spanning more than 490 paragraphs covering use of force, crisis intervention, stops and searches, and other operations.³⁰ Between 2015 and 2023, serious uses of force by NOPD officers fell by 47 percent. On November 19, 2025, U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan formally terminated the decree, ending nearly 13 years of federal oversight roughly a year ahead of the planned sustainment timeline, after the Trump Justice Department moved to support immediate termination.³¹

Confederate Monument Removal (2015–2017)

In 2015, after the racially motivated mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing four Confederate-era monuments. The City Council voted to designate them public nuisances. Between April and May 2017, all four came down: an obelisk commemorating the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place, a statue of Jefferson Davis, an equestrian statue of General P.G.T. Beauregard, and a 16-foot bronze statue of Robert E. Lee atop a 60-foot pedestal at Lee Circle.³²

Two years of lawsuits, protests, and threats preceded the removals. Contractors received death threats, and one had his car firebombed. The first three monuments came down under cover of darkness, with workers wearing masks and ballistic vests.³³ Courts dismissed legal challenges, including one by the Monumental Task Committee claiming the Beauregard statue stood on private property. The Louisiana Legislature considered a bill to require voter approval before local governments could remove war memorials, and the state House’s Black Caucus walked off the floor in protest when the House voted to protect the monuments.³²

The 2025 Bourbon Street Attack

At approximately 3:15 a.m. on January 1, 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old U.S. citizen from Texas and former Army veteran, drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring 57.³⁴ Law enforcement found an ISIS flag in the truck and two functional improvised explosive devices Jabbar had placed nearby, which bomb technicians rendered safe. The FBI investigated the attack as an act of terrorism and determined that Jabbar acted alone after posting videos on Facebook claiming ISIS inspiration.³⁵ Security bollards on Bourbon Street had been removed for repairs at the time of the attack and were reinstalled in the weeks that followed as the city prepared to host Super Bowl LIX the following month.³⁶

The Cantrell Indictment and the Moreno Transition (2025–2026)

On August 15, 2025, a federal grand jury indicted Mayor LaToya Cantrell on 11 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and perjury, making her the first mayor in New Orleans history to be charged while in office.³⁷ Prosecutors alleged that Cantrell and former NOPD officer Jeffrey Vappie ran a years-long scheme using city funds for personal travel and activities related to their intimate relationship, with taxpayers covering more than $70,000 for Vappie’s trips. The indictment further alleged they deleted WhatsApp messages, lied to the FBI, and committed perjury before a grand jury to conceal the scheme.³⁸ Cantrell pleaded not guilty at her September 10, 2025, arraignment and was released without bail, though she was required to surrender her passport.³⁹

Term limits barred Cantrell from running again. On October 11, 2025, Helena Moreno, City Council vice president, former state representative, and former TV news anchor, won the mayoral primary outright with 55 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff in a field of 13 candidates. She took office on January 12, 2026.⁴⁰

How the City Is Governed Today

New Orleans operates under the 1954 Home Rule Charter, which established a mayor-council form of government with a strong executive.⁴¹ The City Council has seven members, five from districts and two at-large, and holds broad legislative authority, including the unusual power to regulate the local electric and gas utility, Entergy New Orleans, rather than deferring to the Louisiana Public Service Commission.⁴² In November 2022, voters approved a charter amendment requiring the mayor to obtain council confirmation for key department head appointments, including the NOPD superintendent.⁴³

Criminal justice has shifted sharply over the past 15 years. In 2010, New Orleans had the highest incarceration rate of any urban jurisdiction in the country, with an average daily jail population of 3,522. By mid-2021, that figure had dropped below 800, a 77 percent reduction driven by bail reform, expanded use of summonses instead of custodial arrests, and faster prosecution timelines. In 2016, the city council barred money-based detention in municipal criminal court, and in 2018 the mayor and council replaced the court revenue previously generated by bail bond fees with direct city funding.⁴⁴

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4
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9
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11
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12
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13
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14
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15
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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25
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26
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27
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28
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29
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30
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31
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32
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33
CNN. New Orleans Removes Confederate Monuments
34
U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee. Congressional Letter Regarding January 1, 2025 Attacks
35
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36
ABC News. Officials Report No Credible Threat to Super Bowl
37
CNN. New Orleans Mayor Indicted
38
Department of Justice. Cantrell and Vappie Indictment
39
Governing. New Orleans Mayor Pleads Not Guilty
40
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41
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42
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43
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44
Advancing Pretrial. New Orleans: A Case Study in Community Engagement