The Mayor Who Modernized New Orleans
deLesseps Story Morrison—everybody called him Chep—was the mayor who dragged New Orleans into the twentieth century, whether it wanted to come or not. From 1946 to 1961, he built, bulldozed, promoted, and politicked his way through a fifteen-year transformation of a city that had been content to let its charm substitute for progress. By the time he was done, New Orleans had a new civic center, a new train station, a recreation department, and an international profile that it hadn't enjoyed since the steamboat era.
Morrison was born in New Roads, Louisiana, in 1912 and came to New Orleans as a young man with the kind of restless energy that the city's old guard found deeply unsettling. He ran for mayor in 1946 as a reformer, taking on the entrenched "Old Regulars" machine that had controlled city politics for decades. He won with the help of newly registered women voters and a public relations operation that was ahead of its time. At thirty-four, he became one of the youngest mayors in the city's history.
What followed was a building spree. Morrison constructed the Civic Center complex that still anchors the downtown government district. He built the Union Passenger Terminal, giving the city a modern train station. He created NORD—the New Orleans Recreation Department—which provided parks, playgrounds, and recreational facilities to neighborhoods that had never had them. He promoted international trade, especially with Latin America, developing Basin Street into the "Garden of the Americas" and positioning New Orleans as a hemispheric commercial hub.
Under Morrison, the city's population peaked at 627,525 in the 1960 census—a number it would never reach again. He was named president of the National League of Cities in 1949, and a later historical survey ranked him the sixteenth-best big-city mayor in American history between 1820 and 1993. He was dynamic, telegenic, and relentlessly ambitious.
But Morrison's legacy is complicated by the issue that complicated everything in mid-century Louisiana: race. He took a fence-straddling approach to segregation that satisfied nobody. He funded improvements in Black neighborhoods but maintained segregationist policies. When the New Orleans school desegregation crisis erupted in 1960—with white mobs screaming at six-year-old Ruby Bridges—Morrison's equivocations damaged his political standing with both sides. He wanted to be a progressive modernizer, but he wasn't willing to pay the political price that true progressivism required.
After leaving the mayor's office in 1961, Morrison was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States by President Kennedy, a role that suited his international ambitions. But on May 22, 1964, Morrison was killed in a plane crash in Mexico. His young son Randy died with him. He was fifty-two years old.
Chep Morrison's New Orleans is still visible today—in the buildings he constructed, the institutions he created, and the international identity he cultivated for the city. He was a builder and a booster, a man who genuinely believed that New Orleans could be both a great American city and the unique cultural treasure it had always been. That he couldn't solve the racial contradictions at the heart of that vision doesn't diminish what he built. It just makes the story more honest.
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