The first time the filmmaker Chike Antoine Ozah laid eyes on Kellie Montoya Brown, a journalist, she was larger than life. Actually, her image was peering down at him from a billboard advertising an NBC affiliated television station in New Orleans. It was late 2018, and Mr. Ozah was in …
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In 1949, as the chef Lena Richard stirred steaming pots of okra gumbo and shrimp bisque on live TV in New Orleans, viewers across the city — …
Branford Marsalis has traveled the world over, but one trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the bandleader on “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited on a local talk show that was being broadcast …
The Archdiocese of New Orleans was facing a crisis. A sex-abuse scandal was bursting into public view, sending shock waves through the heavily Catholic city. Leaders of one of New Orleans’s other major institutions, the N.F.L.’s New Orleans Saints, were concerned. Gayle Benson, the team’s owner, is a devout Catholic, …
Long before Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones and Rihanna, there was Freddie Colston. Colston was just a 20-year-old student from tiny Fairbanks, La., when he traveled to Los Angeles in January 1967. He had grown up in a home without indoor plumbing, but now he was staying in lavish accommodations …
The Islamic State has lost thousands of fighters to death or prison and suffered the demise of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But the global reach of the group, also known as ISIS, is still vast, in part because of its sophisticated media output and the people around …