Civic Season Guidebook 2025 (1) - Flipbook - Page 14
Gather in
The Café
meet your guide, Leah Chase.
I am the Queen of Creole Cuisine. At age 23, I started
working in my in-laws’ restaurant, Dooky Chase. I invited
everyone, regardless of skin color, to dine at our
restaurant — a radical idea in the 1940s. Dooky Chase
was a meeting place for civil rights leaders such as
Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I transformed my in-laws’ restaurant from a small
sandwich shop into a well-known fine dining restaurant
featuring the first Black art gallery in New Orleans, I
became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a pillar
of the New Orleans community.
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