In New Orleans, Georg and I taught at Dillard, a black university. There was no campus housing available at Dillard, so we rented an apartment at the Parkchester apartment complex nearby. It consisted of brick buildings, each of which had eight apartments. Most of the people who lived in the complex were relative newcomers from Southern states who felt insecure economically and socially. They knew that we taught at Dillard, and someone kept scribbling the letter “N”, in front of our name on the mailbox. It was also at Parkchester that, for the first and only time during our stay in the South, we were threatened with violence. The violence was especially nasty because some of it was directed against our children. A doctoral student in history from Tulane University lived with his family in the same building as we. He had arrived recently from Memphis. One day, after a black colleague and his wife had visited us, we received a call from the manager of Parkchester. He told us that two couples, including the doctoral student, had complained about our black visitors and had asked him to give us notice. The manager defended our right to invite whomever we wanted—he was a Quaker, but advised us not to accompany our guests to their cars and to pull our blinds when we had black guests.
That evening when the children were in the playground behind the building, we heard some screaming and saw the student’s wife push four-year-old Danny off the swing and chase him away. Then the man came, insulted Georg, and challenged him to a fistfight. We suddenly were surrounded by neighbors, who watched silently except for one man who called us names. The next day we told the president of Dillard about the incident. He made sure that within a few days we could move to Gentilly Gardens, which was owned by the university and where mostly Dillard faculty lived. At that point several of the Parkchester neighbors, who had ignored us up to that time, became particularly friendly and let us know that they were sorry about what had happened.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 66f