An enslaved fight for freedom, a Civil Rights student protest and a harmony encampment have something in common. They occurred on the Mississippi River levee in St. John the Baptist Parish.
This site is included in “Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds,” a report and digital exhibition focusing on 13 protest sites, published by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) in Washington, D.C.
Each site “is embedded with environmental and cultural characteristics that provide visual and sensory connections to the past,” TCLF’s President & CEO Charles Birnbaum said. They “serve as critical reminders that peaceful acts of public protest can alter the course of history.”
Charles Deslondes, an enslaved Creole, led a protest on the Mississippi levee on Jan. 8, 1811. According to Demonstrations Grounds, hundreds of enslaved workers marched toward New Orleans for two days, burning plantations and sugar cane fields. Militia and federal soldiers stopped them, executing Deslondes and others.
In 1968, Edgard’s Second Ward High School students “walked out of their segregated classrooms to protest subpar learning conditions,” the report states. Black students “read from battered books and walked along the levees to school, while white students had buses and new materials.”
State police ended the protest.
In 1972, jazz drummer Eddie “Poppa Duke” Edwards Jr. led a unique protest. He created “Papa Dukie and the Mud People,” a traveling commune of musicians and professionals that spent 22 months on the levee, working in the community and playing music. The objective, Edwards’ 2016 obituary states, was “to create better race relations between people of all races while teaching universal brotherhood.”
Twins Jo and Joy Banner, founders of the nonprofit Descendants Project, fight for historic and cultural preservation for descendants of enslaved people. They are working to place interpretive markers at the Mississippi River levee site.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
