Post-World War II
Police harassment of the kind that precipitated the riot of 1900 persisted through the 1950s, and city landlords continued to discriminate by color. Although a moderate mayor, deLesseps "Chep" Morrison, helped to curtail police racism, he opposed the desegregation of schools, transportation, and lunch counters. The NAACP, however, won these gains in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, political victories for African Americans became far more common, and New Orleans elected its first black mayor, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, in 1978.
These changes in the political sphere reflected the major demographic shift that came with the advent of the suburbs. New Orleans's location on the Mississippi River delta had restricted the city's growth for 200 years, because most of the surrounding land was useless swamp. Using modern technology, developers drained marshlands and built new neighborhoods, and white residents moved in as soon as they could. Between 1950 and 1975, the greater metropolitan area doubled in geographic size, and the white population within the city itself declined drastically.
New Orleans lost a good deal of its tax base as whites fled to the suburbs, yet the city did not die the death of many Northern industrial cities. Through the end of the 20th century, the distinctive food, music, and annual Mardi Gras celebration attracted thousands of tourists. The historians Arnold R. Hirsh and Joseph Logsdon contend, "the delicate cultural amalgam that gave us jazz, a unique cuisine, and a love for public festivals is beleaguered but not yet obliterated."