Everything Under the Sun: The Quorum Club
Inside the Quorum, 1960s, screenshot from the documentary “The Quorum.”
A haven for free-thinkers in the mid-60s, the Esplanade Avenue coffee house broke racial barriers of the day – and paid a price.
— By Mary Rickard
– photos courtesy The Quorum documentary
On a sweltering July night in 1964, a battery of New Orleans police burst into Louisiana’s only integrated coffee house, rousting patrons who had come to hear legendary blues guitarist Babe Stovall. Havoc ensued. The scope of the raid grew when cops tore upstairs to a second-floor apartment where portrait artist George Dureau was hosting his own very lively birthday party.
Although one of Dureau’s frightened party-goers managed to escape arrest by jumping out a window, vice squad officers still rounded up 73 unsuspecting Black, white and Creole people, citing them with disturbing the peace with “tuneless strumming of guitars and pointless intellectual conversation.”
But undoubtedly, every person arrested understood the real reason for the bust: integration.
Although the Civil Rights Act had been passed just weeks earlier on July 2, 1964 – legally ending segregation in public places – social customs in New Orleans would take decades longer to change.
"They [the police] were just hell-bent on keeping races separated," Roxanne Wright said in a recent interview. Wright used to drop in at The Quorum when her husband Don was playing jazz. On the night of the big bust, she’d been headed to the club with friends and although she escaped arrest, she was confronted outside by police.
Wright said The Quorum Club simply provided a place for “like-minded people getting together for intellectual stimulation. I didn't even have a thought that it was radical...
“There was a certain amount of fear as we knew that the police might come and we might be arrested,” she said. “But I went anyway because I felt I had the right to socialize with anyone."
The ground-breaking Quorum venture began in 1963, at a time when artists and musicians from all over the country flocked to the French Quarter and the Marigny, seeking a bohemian lifestyle and cheap rent. When the popular Ryder Coffee Shop on Rampart Street shut down, its nonconformist patrons joined forces to find a new location to gather.
The location of the Ryder coffee house on N. Rampart.
They settled on a nearby 19th-century townhouse on Esplanade Avenue, owned by the Italian Redemptorist Methodist Church. Figure painter George Dureau lived on the second floor of the building, and a young seaman, Reggie Grue, and his wife, the late Lee Meitzen Grue – a salon shampoo girl and University of New Orleans creative writing student – lived in the attic apartment.
Buildings on the 600 block of Esplanade in the 1970s. The one that had served as the Quorum Club is on the far right. Courtesy The Historic New Orleans Collection, acc.no.1976…178.129 i-iii.
The building that was formerly home of the Quorum Club is now entirely residential.
The Ryder Coffee Shop group donated their own money to pay the first month’s rent and its former owner contributed coffee-making equipment and furniture: chairs, tables, couches, and a coffin that was used as a table. The Quorum Club name was chosen to reflect the new place’s collaborative spirit. The pastor of the Methodist church which owned the building, the Rev. Robert A. Shirley, was tapped by the group to serve as the president of the coffee house.
Dureau had been a tenant of 611 Esplanade several years before The Quorum opened, but viewed the transformation as exciting. "We used to have just an old drunk lady down there beating her husband and now we've got a little poetry and a little troubling and worrying over the ways of the world and such,” he said later.i
"We had tremendous parties on the roof. We all knew each other and would become good friends. There were a lot of very talented people," Lee Grue said before her death in 2021.
The late Lee Grue, poet.
Lee often read her poetry in the coffee house downstairs, working to help establish The Quorum as a neutral space for intellectuals – regardless of race – to enjoy jazz, conversation, poetry and politics.
The Quorum featured a variety of notable performers, including folk singers Weldon Miscenich and Jerry Jeff Walker. Poetry readings were accompanied by jazz music. Eluard Burt played flute, backed by congas, bass and vibraphone, developing a genre that became Afro Music. Other jamming musicians included Earl Tillman, Alfred Uganda Roberts, Fred Sheppard, Ben Thompson and Chuck Brady.
The first time Lee Grue heard Bob Dylan's music was at The Quorum; the folk singer was rumored to be living in the Bywater. There was Greek and interpretive dancing. Doratha Smith-Simmons recalled seeing "The Birth of a Nation," shown there, a silent film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan and dehumanizing emancipated slaves.
"They did everything under the sun in the club," Grue said.
“Everything” included welcoming patrons without regard to race.
"Back then, [Black and white] people could be arrested for talking to one another in a bank teller line," remembered the late Creole filmmaker Maurice "Marty" Martinez, who passed in 2022. In the 60s, he taught math at George Washington Carver High School and who also played music and read poetry at The Quorum Club. He and Harriet Ottenheimer later made a documentary film about their experiences at The Quorum.ii
Maurice Martinez, director and co-producer of The Quorum documentary
"We had the power to run an integrated place,” said Ottenheimer, who was then a graduate student in anthropology. “We opened as a private club. Anyone who came in the door and bought a cup of coffee could be a member. We gave them a membership card.
"If we were successful in getting people to play chess together, we were showing that integration could be a success. And we could have a good time of it!"
Dr. Harriet Ottenheimer, co-producer of the Quorum documentary
In the early ‘60s, New Orleans' population was still majority white and both public and private institutions, like public schools, City Park, YMCA and the New Orleans Athletic Club were still segregated. Grue laughingly said she once "accidentally" integrated the iconic athletic club by inviting Black poets to speak in its decorous library.
As a consequence, whites and Blacks had few opportunities for social encounters.
In a 1988 essay,(iii) novelist James Nolan wrote, "As a high school student, when I started to hang out at [Ivan's] discussion group in the coffee houses, bars and apartments of the Quarter, for the first time, I socially met black people.”
Ivan's Discussion Group met every other Friday night from the mid-1950s for more than 25 years at various locations throughout the French Quarter. At the group meetings, Nolan “met independent women, street artists, homosexuals, civil rights workers, people over 30 who didn't act like my parents, pot-smokers and visionaries, those who couldn't or wouldn't be part of 'The Lonely Crowd.'"
When the Quorum Club opened, it offered a permanent and welcoming home to those bohemians, intellectuals and artists, anyone – regardless of their race – actively seeking opportunities to exchange ideas and artistic expression.
"Going to The Quorum was something you weren't supposed to do," Nolan recalled. “The artsy people went there.”
July 29, 1964, would have been a good night to be somewhere else. That hot summer night started off like any other weeknight. A big crowd had come to the coffee house to hear Babe Stovall, a popular Delta Blues musician from Franklinton, La., famous for being able to play guitar behind his back.
George Dureau was hosting a birthday party up in his apartment. "Somebody had posted fliers on telephone poles, but nobody knew who," Ottenheimer recalled.
Dureau was dancing around his un-airconditioned apartment in a bathing suit, drinking vodka punch when the mayhem began. Once he understood there was a raid, he tried grabbing clothes, but officers repeatedly pushed him down the stairs, later citing him for resisting arrest. Melvin DeGrange, a city employee, jumped out the window to save his reputation and job.
A youthful George Dureau
The hapless people who had come to see Babe Stovall’s performance and the party-goers from Dureau’s apartment were herded into waiting police vans and charged with disturbing the peace.
The 2004 film "The Quorum" included interviews with individuals who were at the club that night. In it, Roxanne Wright recalled the night of the bust: "When we looked up, there were policemen on the rooftop with their guns drawn. Then Clarence Giarrusso (narcotics chief) walked out very fast with his badge, demanding, ‘What are you doing here?’...We said: ‘We came to meet some friends and to talk and drink some coffee." Giarruso told Wright and her friends to take off.
"That was the first time I was that close to a policeman," Wright said in a recent interview. "My heart was pounding."
Jim Sohr, a painter who once took a turn as coffee house manager for the bohemian hangout, was quoted in a July 31, 1964, Times-Picayune article about the bust: "When we got down to the police station at St. Claude and Poland Avenue, they really had to wrack their brains to figure out how to separate us. They had to put the black females in one cell. The black males in another cell. The white females in one cell and the white males in another cell. One of the policemen explained, ‘We don’t mix ‘em here!’”
Decades later when we talked, Wright still seemed astonished at the ironic twist: "They couldn't even put them together in jail!" she said.
Roxanne Wright
After the bust, Chief of Police Joseph Giarruso excoriated the regular coffee house crowd as the "scum of the earth." Sgt. Frederick Soule Jr. claimed the motivation for the raid was that the meeting place was a hotbed for communism, propaganda, homosexuality and racial integration. While civil rights attorney (and later mayor of New Orleans) Ernest Nathan "Dutch" Morial bailed everyone out the next day and all charges were dropped, it was too late for many patrons. Names, addresses and races had already been printed in the papers.
"The fallout from the article was tremendous," Ottenheimer recalled. "Some people lost jobs, got evicted."
Actually, the police had been working to undermine The Quorum for months before the raid. Undercover agents had been investigating the coffee house in hopes of finding drugs. The Grues remembered that the detectives’ disguises always appeared overly neat – they were clean-shaven and wearing straw hats, white socks and black shoes. A couple of undercover cops even read their own poems in efforts to pass undetected.
In a recent conversation, Jim Sohr said "the real problem was not drugs; it was race mixing. [If you were white] you weren’t supposed to associate with Black people. Blacks were not allowed on Bourbon Street or the river side of Dauphine."
(Not that the police force then showed any leniency for drugs. Sohr claims to have been set up by an undercover cop at The Quorum and was sentenced to six years in Angola for selling a matchbox full of marijuana at a time when either using or selling the drug was a felony).
"We weren't interested in starting anything [trouble]. We were interested in talking to each other," Elouard Burt told "The Quorum" filmmakers, referring to the period of great social change.
"We weren’t thinking about ourselves as white, Black, Republican and Democrat. There were artists, musicians, writers. What color you were didn’t matter, until we [Black people] came out of the club and the police would stop us just for walking down the street," Burt said. "It wasn't easy to get together with anybody.”
After the bust, The Quorum reopened, and while harassment continued, it continued as an island of progressive thinking. The Vietnam War was escalating and many anti-war discussions took place in the coffee house. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and Freedom Riders traveled through the South helping to integrate public buses and lunch counters, The Quorum provided a space to organize voter registration.
Quorum Club member and activist Lanny Goldfinch was arrested in a sit-in at Woolworth’s diner on Canal Street. Reggie Grue remembers that members of the White Citizens Council, opposing school integration, one night threw rocks and bottles at The Quorum. He ran downstairs to chase them away.
Despite the charges being dropped in the 1964 bust, police harassment of the Quorum Club continued. In a UPI story the Crowley Post-Signal ran in April 1966, four people were arrested for drugs in the place Police Lieutenant Clarence Giarrusso characterized as “a social dungeon.”
The Rev. Robert Shirley, who was still president of the club – as well as serving as Protestant chaplain for the New Orleans Police Department at the time – defended the club, saying that anyone under the influence of either drugs or alcohol wasn’t even permitted in the club. He believed that “political pressure” had been brought to bear on the club because it permitted “Negro” members.
“Shirley listed 150 active members [of the Quorum Club, including artists, doctors, lawyers, policemen, priests, ex-convicts and striptease artists. ‘It’s probably the only place in town where a police and a stripper can talk,’ he said.”
The trailer for “The Quorum” award-winning documentary. It’s available to check out at the New Orleans Public Library. For more information about purchase, see the documentary website.
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