Oretha Castle Haley: The Woman Who Desegregated Canal Street

The Woman Who Desegregated Canal Street

In 1960, a twenty-one-year-old Southern University student named Oretha Castle sat down at a segregated lunch counter at McCrory's on Canal Street and refused to leave. She was arrested. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And she was just getting started.

Castle was born in Oakland, Tennessee, in 1939, but New Orleans is where she found her calling. As a student at Southern University of New Orleans, she became the head of the New Orleans chapter of CORE — the Congress of Racial Equality — and turned her home into the nerve center of the civil rights movement in the city.

The Canal Street sit-ins were her first major action. Castle and three others were arrested at McCrory's, and their case, Lombard v. Louisiana, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1963, the Court overturned their convictions, citing violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a landmark decision that struck at the legal foundations of segregation in public accommodations.

But Castle's most remarkable contribution might have been what she did during the Freedom Summer of 1961. As head of CORE in New Orleans, she turned her family home into a safe house for Freedom Riders traveling through the South. With help from her mother and sister, she housed and fed hundreds of activists who were putting their lives on the line to challenge segregation. Her living room was the staging ground for one of the most dangerous and consequential campaigns of the civil rights era.

After the major victories of the mid-sixties, Castle — now Castle Haley, after her marriage — shifted to voter registration, anti-poverty work, and political organizing. She championed the desegregation of public playgrounds and managed Dorothy Mae Taylor's successful 1971 campaign, making Taylor Louisiana's first African American female state legislator. In the 1980s, she worked as deputy administrator at Charity Hospital.

She died in 1987, at just forty-eight years old. Two years later, Dryades Street in Central City was renamed Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard — a fitting tribute to a woman who spent her life making New Orleans live up to its promises. Her childhood home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.