(C) Verite News New Orleans
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Verite News New Orleans [1]
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Date: 2025-01-31
Before Terry Mogilles was a nurse at University Medical Center, she ran a group home that offered care to mentally ill patients in a house where the Veterans Affairs building now stands. The home had been built by Smith Wendell Green (1860-1946), a prominent Black businessman and civil rights leader, and inside of it was his original furniture, including a wooden buffet table.
The table housed linens and doilies that Green’s enslaved family members made before emancipation. Mogilles and her husband moved the buffet to a building on Canal Street to keep them safe as they created their group home. But when Katrina came, that building flooded, destroying the buffet and everything else that was inside.
Mogilles said that the buffet and the linens were irreplaceable. She said she felt sad and guilty, thinking that she had let Green down by failing to preserve objects of his legacy. When she heard that they had lost the buffet immediately after the hurricane, she said started to understand that her life was changing
She said that losing the buffet symbolized losing a piece of Black history, a piece of history that was mostly unknown to Mogilles before she bought the home.
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Read more from this series Diaries New Orleans East native Amanda Bonam recalls how the loss of their childhood journals impacted their life. Skiff Boat Norris Cook recounts his experiences and lessons learned from his grandfather on his green skiff boat.
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