"chocolate New Orleans"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

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http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/17/nagin.city/index.html

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Mayor Ray Nagin on Monday called for
the rebuilding of a "chocolate New Orleans" that maintains the city's
black majority, saying, "You can't have New Orleans no other way."
"I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This
city will be chocolate at the end of the day," Nagin said in a Martin
Luther King Jr. Day speech. "This city will be a majority
African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."
Uptown is a reference to a mostly white part of the city.
Pressed later to explain his comments, Nagin, who is black, told CNN
affiliate WDSU-TV that he was referring to creation of a racially
diverse city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, insisting that his
remarks were not divisive.
"How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with
white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I
am talking about," he said.
"New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a
chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black
working together, coming together and making something special."
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"Chocolate" = 'majority African-American (of a city)' isn't in
OED/HDAS. Barry noted in a post back in 2000 that "Chocolate City" is
an old nickname for Washington DC -- Proquest has cites in the Wash
Post back to 1973. Is the extension of "chocolate city" to other
majority-black urban areas attributable to Parliament's 1975 song
"Chocolate City" from the album of the same name?

"There are a lot of chocolate cities around / We got Newark, we got
Gary / Somebody told me we got L.A. / And we're workin' on Atlanta."


--Ben Zimmer

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