What happened to the Rhodes Family Gospel Tent?

[laura briggin]

I am a gospel choir member in Unity Church of Richmond California. I have enjoyed 5 years of the Jazz Fest minus last year due to a wedding. My favorite part of the Jazz Fest has been the Rhodes Family Gospel Tent.

What happened to this family after the hurricane? They were in the papers for several months after the hurricane and since then I haven't been able to track them.

I am returning this year for the May weekend!

Laura

[glinda]

Hi Laura - I wondered the same thing - they did not sponsor the tent last year and I don't see their name on the sponsor list this year either. My only guess is that their business was badly hurt by K*****a.

[chrisjoseph]

Funeral Directors Face Life After Katrina

News Report, Words: Kenneth Mallory, Photos: Jane Tyska,
Afro.com, Mar 17, 2006
The following story, the first of two parts, examines the issues facing the Black funeral industry in New Orleans. The story was produced as a result of a reporting fellowship sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Knight Foundation, along with New America Media.

NEW ORLEANS – With the crisp waves in his hair shining, Arthur Hickerson exudes a debonair cool. Impeccably dressed in a chocolate and tan pin striped suit, tan dress shirt, orange, brown and tan print tie, his feet are encased in brown crocodile shoes, standing outside his place of business, Heritage Funeral Directors, on a February evening.
Hickerson
Hickerson’s nattiness and the sturdy building housing his operation, which rests along Saint Claude Avenue in the Orleans Parish, seem to stand as an anomaly in the midst of their surroundings. Few businesses in the area are open; some are standing with plywood nailed to their windows. But Hickerson recently had the exterior of the strangely resilient Heritage freshly painted beige.

Katrina hasn’t completely shut Hickerson’s seven-year business or seemed to dampen his entrepreneurial spirit. He said he’s been back in action since a month and a half after the storm.

Black lettering scribbled on a piece of paper on the facade of the place reads that Heritage is open, leading to a mobile phone number for prospective clients to call. Customers are indeed calling, but they aren’t heading to Heritage to view their relatives’ bodies, like he said they did before the storm.

Although Katrina left more than four feet of floodwater inside of his facility and some “damage to the foundation” of Heritage, that he pointed out during a tour of the place, six months after the storm, the mortician, with 30 years experience in the industry, said he was planning to re-open in a couple of weeks.

Hickerson is refurbishing Heritage, awaiting new furniture and a new phone system. Since the storm, the embalmer and funeral director has met with clients at a funeral parlor some miles away on North Claiborne Avenue, the Louisiana Undertaking Company, where he and a few other African-American funeral directors have set up shop.

Continuing to serve New Orleans

Hickerson, 52, the directors at the Undertaking, along with a small number of others according to insiders, comprise a handful of Black mortuary professionals who are continuing to serve New Orleans despite the many obstacles the aftermath of Katrina has created.

Renard Bossiere, a self-reported 33-year veteran of the industry, is one of the funeral directors operating out of the Undertaking.

He estimated that approximately 15 to 17 Black-owned funeral homes existed in the city before the hurricane.
Casket
Now, he believes three of the Black-owned funeral homes existing in the city are “operational,” and some of the remaining “working through” existing establishments like the Undertaking.

Although the local industry is not as large as it once was, it appears that African-American New Oleanders are maintaining traditions many say have been prevalent in the Black community for years, patronizing the services of their own and desiring to be buried in their hometown.

Black funeral homes and directors: pillars of the community

Hall Davis IV, vice president and the future president-elect of the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association (NFDMA), the largest black national professional association of its kind, spoke on how Black funeral homes have been a linchpin of the African-American community.

According to Davis, the fourth generation owner of Hall Davis and Sons Funeral Service in Baton Rouge, the funeral industry has historically been a segregated one.

He recalled a time in history when Blacks could only get ambulances from Black funeral homes.

“Funeral homes ran the ambulance industry in this country for years,” Davis said.

Hearses, he said, were called “combinations” and were designed to hold stretchers in addition to caskets.
Author Kenneth Mallory

It was taboo, according Davis, for Blacks to be buried by Whites. And it seems the segregation of the industry still persists.

“There’s still a myth that this is probably the most racially divided industry in the country,” said Davis. “It’s been that separation there and it’s still there.”

Black directors cite the cultural sensitivity African-American morticians provide while embalming black bodies and arranging funeral services.

“We know how to service our people,” said Bossiere. “We feel it. We have a soul for it.”

Davis said there are cultural differences that make Black-owned homes more in tune to the needs of Blacks.

When compared to others, Black families, in general, take more time to bury relatives after their death, he said, and prefer to “eat and fellowship after the funeral.”

Other directors cite the fact that Blacks tend to have their funeral services at churches as opposed to funeral halls.

Maintaining one’s funeral customs are crucial, according to Davis, as they allow a family to heal.

“I always tell people, ‘When you bury somebody, you use what has been traditionally done in your family because the funeral is for a healing process. That whole process you go through is what helps you heal from your grief.’”

‘A Different World’

On the mend in the months since the storm, business seems to be steady for many directors, who cite the fact that storm evacuees are returning home to be buried.

“A good percentage of our work is coming in from other places around the country,” said Duplain Rhodes III, who along with his sisters operates Rhodes Family Funeral Home, which has been in existence for over 100 years, discussing the storm evacuees that his business is serving. “Ultimately, these people want to come home.”

But in published reports, pundits contend that many African Americans may never return to New Orleans, which before the storm was predominately Black.
Rhodes
Some funeral directors question whether the customer bases once sustaining the Black mortuary industry in the city will return.

Davis projected that funeral directors in New Orleans will “never have the population that would support the rate of death that’s needed to have the kind of funerals they’re going to need so consequently, a lot of funeral homes won’t open back up in New Orleans because the population shift is going to be disbursed all over this country.”

And the costs for some of the independent funeral homes still in operation could prove too high to handle.

Davis noted the expenses in running a “first class operation,” using his expansive funeral home as an example. He said some of the expenses that arise from operating a funeral home include paying employees, leasing automobiles and in Louisiana, paying taxes on an essential item of inventory.

“Here in Louisiana, you pay taxes when you buy caskets; you pay taxes when you sell
caskets,” he said, unlike some other states and the South.

Insurance, he said, is another issue facing the local funeral industry.

“One thing I learned is that in this part of the country, there is a risk in owning a quality facility like this when you have to deal with insurance companies who kind of don’t want to pay out when disasters happen.”

Davis said because of the many regulations governing the funeral industry, directors are
expecting a 25 percent increase in the price of insurance because of Katrina and
such would affect the ultimate cost of a funeral.

And he maintained that because of its high cost, many Black funeral homes might not have had flood insurance before the storm.

Further, facilities ravaged by Katrina have cost a dear price to directors.

Louis Charbonnet, owner of Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home that has been in existence since the 1880s, has been the coordinator of many traditional jazz-style funerals in the city. Charbonnet owns Cooper-Glapion funeral home on Caffin Avenue in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. The home, like mostly all of the area has been pummeled by the hurricane.

“Completely destroyed,” Charbonnet said of the place that is molded and debris strewn. “There’s nobody there . . . There’s not any activity around there. That’s about 25 percent of my business that’s gone,” he said.

Destroyed churches, sites where directors like Hickerson have arranged funeral services before the storm, can’t be used any more, said Kim Thibodaux, the Caucasian director of Thibodaux’s Funeral Service.

Thibodaux said before the storm she provided funeral services for some of the city’s poor ninth-ward Blacks at area churches. The arrangement helped her clients to contain costs, she said, but after the storm she has “crammed” some of her services into her modest hall on Gentilly Boulevard, as many churches in the area are inhabitable.

“Life is very different post Katrina,” said Thibodaux speaking about the various situations she and some of her peers are facing. “It’s very different -- a different world.”

Kamika Dunlap, staff writer for the Oakland Tribune, contributed to this report. Photos by Jane Tyska.

[Corona]

:( :( they sound like an amazing family.

[heyhon]

I recall marvelling at the sponser sign out front: the Tulane- Rhodes Gospel Tent, how those titles went so well together. And I seem to recall that Rhodes was also pitching limosine services as part of their thing on that sign, and the light bulb going on in my brain - Of course! They're in the "Transportation" business.