An appeal for a monument to the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt
IBRAHIMA SECK
11 September 2016
Following a trend in many Southern states to take down the Confederate battle flag, the City Council of New Orleans voted on 17 December 2015 to remove four monuments to the Confederacy from the city’s landscape. Three of those statues honour General Robert E. Lee, General Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. The fourth monument is an obelisk celebrating the Battle of Liberty Place, when members of the Crescent City White League attacked the New Orleans Metropolitan Police in their effort to overthrow a biracial Republican government and a black-dominated legislature. The proposal was introduced by a majority of City Council members. But opponents to took it to the Federal Appeals Court, while white supremacists started threatening those sponsoring the proposal and the contractor hired for the job ...
In sharp contrast to New Orleans, a museum exclusively dedicated to the memorialisation of slavery was recently open to the public on the Whitney Plantation ... As a site of memory, with the focus on the lives of the slaves and their legacies, visitors can experience the world of an 18th and 19th century indigo or sugar plantation through the eyes of the enslaved people who lived and worked there ...
Yet the most striking memorial at the Whitney Museum is still in the making and is dedicated to the 1811 slave uprising on the German coast of Louisiana. In January 1811, an uprising erupted involving an estimated number of 500 enslaved people in the lower Mississippi parishes of St. Charles, St. John, and St. James. It was the largest slave revolt in the U.S South, beginning on 8 January on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry, commander of the local militia. On their march towards New Orleans, the insurgents burned several plantations and added more recruits, including maroons who had been living in the woods. Many planters fled to the city with their families.
The uprising had several leaders – five of them born in Africa. It was apparently well planned and sought to capture New Orleans, free all the people enslaved there, and either lay the foundations for a black ‘nation’ or lead the people to a free country like Haiti or Mexico. The plotters knew that if they lost only death would await ...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/ibrahima-seck/appeal-for-monument-to-1811-louisiana-slave-revolt
= new reply since forum marked as read
