THE QUORUM

Study Questions for the documentary:

1. What do the opening scenes tell you about New Orleans?

2. What were the “good” and “bad” things considered at Quorum discussions? What were the social issues of the time?

3. Who was Babe Stovall?

4. What was the Free Southern Theatre and why did it move from Jackson, MS to New Orleans?

5. What was the real reason that Quorum patrons were arrested?

6. What’s a Creole?

7. What do Strom Thurmond and Thomas Jefferson have in common?

8. Why did members of the white intelligentsia want to mingle with members of the black intelligentsia at the Quorum? How did this help artists reach a “new kind of creativity?”

9. Was the New Orleans’ social revolution of the 1960s different from that of the rest of the country? In what way?

10. How did the Quorum “revalidate” its patrons?

11. Why did New Orleans’ school children have to identify their race when they began school?

12. At the end of the film, two models for living are suggested by Virginia Kennedy. What are they? How do they differ?

13. What were some of the games played at the Quorum?

14. Why did white parents picket the public schools.

15. What rationale did conservatives give for equating "intergration" (as misspelled on the signs)with "communism"?

16. What organized segregationist groups were opposed to integration?

17. How did the police and vice squad use the Quorum as an example of integrationist/homosexual/communist agitation? What actions did they take?

18. Who is Jerry Jeff Walker? What does he mean when he said that the Quorum was "a good place to happen?"

19. Describe the social setting at the Quorum?

20. What is the meaning of the old French Creole proverb: "He who strikes the blow, forgets. He who bears the marks, remembers?"