This article examines the relationship between the struggle for African American civil rights and efforts to expand tourism, conventions, and spectator sports in New Orleans, Louisiana, between 1954 and 1969. Drawing on previously neglected archival sources and personal interviews, it considers how the pressure to maintain New Orleans's progressive image as an urbane tourist destination required abandoning Jim Crow customs and embracing the growing national commitment to racial progress. It argues that an unlikely coalition of civil rights activists, tourism interests, municipal officials, and a small segment of New Orleans's old-line social establishment adopted a tourism-related rhetoric to counter the city's dominant discourses of racist resistance to change. By the late 1960s, New Orleans's white leaders agreed that they could no longer countenance overt racial discrimination if New Orleans was to maintain a favorable tourist image.

In the mid-twentieth century, Cleveland, Ohio’s University Circle exemplified an emerging trend in which urban universities and other private institutions engaged in urban renewal. Situating the story of University Circle within the context of contemporary concerns about urban decay, deindustrialization, and suburbanization, the author argues that University Circle institutions were not simply trying to facilitate their own expansion. Rather, they were equally determined to create a setting appropriate to their regional, national, and even international reputations, as well as to advance the idea that an educational, medical, and cultural district could help reposition and rebrand a sagging industrial city. To do so, institutional leaders sought to make University Circle a bulwark against urban problems, which endeared them to suburbanites while constraining their relations with surrounding urban neighborhoods.