ABSTRACT
People lined New Orleans’s Magazine Street in the July heat of 1948 to see a parade introducing the electric trolley coaches (electric buses on rubber tires) that were replacing the Magazine streetcars. Sponsored by New Orleans Public Service, Inc. (NOPSI), and the Magazine Street Businessmen’s Association, the parade offered four familiar Mardi Gras krewes running off season, the young Mayor Morrison, and a transportation history of the city. From mule-drawn streetcars ferrying belles in hoop skirts, to the first and then a later version of the electric streetcar, to the new electric trolley coach, the parade presented its audience a linear narrative of progress set within a familiar power structure embodied in antebellum costumes, Mardi Gras krewes, and a young mayor for whom reform did not mean desegregation. While Navy planes overhead reminded parade-goers of the power of American progress, absent from this urban parade were the streetcar histories of Negro New Orleanians and of the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees and any reference to the fifty-four motor buses that were also replacing electric streetcars on the Magazine Street line.
