Actor from the HBO’s “The Wire” to Open Grocery Store in New Orleans

Mr. Pierce, 48, grew up in Pontchartrain Park, one of the first suburban-style subdivisions developed for and by African-Americans after World War II, when New Orleans was still racially segregated by law.

But the neighborhood, born from the ugliness of separate-but-equal, blossomed into something beautiful, a “black Mayberry,” Mr. Pierce recalled.

More than 90 percent of families owned their own homes. Children rode bikes after school around the central golf course. Everyone knew everyone. Growing up, he jokes, his last name might as well have been “Mrs. Pierce’s son” as in: “Oh, you’re Wendell, Mrs. Pierce’s son.”

By the 1950s and ’60s, the neighborhood was home to the city’s rising African-American middle class. New Orleans’s first black mayor, Ernest N. Morial, known as Dutch, grew up there, as did Eddie J. Jordan Jr., the city’s first black district attorney, and the current Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lisa P. Jackson.

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