LEILA FADEL, HOST:
A Louisiana plantation house where one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history began is under Black ownership for the first time. The new owners plan to preserve it as a museum. They want the 1811 uprising to inspire new generations to confront racism. NPR's Debbie Elliott has our story. And a warning - this piece includes details of the violent suppression of a slave revolt.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Jo Banner is proud to show the newly acquired Woodland Plantation House near the banks of the Mississippi River in LaPlace, La.
JO BANNER: Excited. We have still a lot of work to do, but I think for a home to be from 1793, it looks rather good.
ELLIOTT: The white, raised, Creole-style building has a rusty tin roof and a wide front porch. Forest-green wooden shutters cover the windows and doors.
JO BANNER: There we go.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Door open.
ELLIOTT: Banner and her twin sister, Joy, are co-founders of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit in Louisiana's heavily industrialized river parishes just west of New Orleans. Joy Banner says early this year, the group bought the Woodland Plantation home, making it Black owned for the first time in more than two centuries.
JOY BANNER: Our mission is to eradicate the legacies of slavery. So for us, it's the intersection of historic preservation, the preservation of our communities, which are also historic, and our fight for environmental justice.
ELLIOTT: The 1811 rebellion involved hundreds of enslaved people, thought to be the largest in U.S. history.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
ELLIOTT: Walking along the hardwood floors of the plantation house, Jo Banner points to the front door.
JO BANNER: The start of the 1811 revolt happened here. Well, on this porch, then kind of in this room.
ELLIOTT: They wounded the white plantation owner and killed his son. Banner says at the time, both sides of the Mississippi were lined with sugarcane plantations. So the enslaved were in close proximity, able to devise a plan to overtake the plantations one by one and escape to create a free territory downriver.
JO BANNER: So as they were marching from one space to the next, they were continually gathering more people to join them for their fight. The point was to get them to New Orleans so that they could gain their freedom. However, within three days, the "insurrection," quote-unquote, was stopped.
ELLIOTT: Local militias backed by U.S. troops swiftly put down the rebellion, killing dozens of the people trying to escape slavery. But for decades, that story wasn't told during tours of the grand plantation homes lining the Mississippi River. The Banner sisters, descendants of two of those plantations, both worked in tourism in what has been marketed as New Orleans plantation country. Jo Banner says they saw firsthand the need for a more honest narrative.
JO BANNER: You're thinking of - what? - "Gone With The Wind," the ladies in hoop skirts, the mint juleps. You're really trying to portray this image of plantation life, removing the brutality of it, removing everything that made it what it was.
ELLIOTT: The Banners say they want to create a space to foster what they call restorative, descendant-engaged tourism. They say that means using the site as a cultural center to celebrate the contributions of the enslaved, highlighting their architectural skill and artistic endeavors, for instance, and also to learn from how they fought for freedom. It's a lesson local Black activists say is long overdue.
DERRON COOK: Really, it was more of a hidden history.
ELLIOTT: Derron Cook says even though his grandparents farmed near Woodland Quarters, the neighborhood where the enslaved once lived, he never learned about the 1811 uprising as a child. Now, as a local high school teacher, Cook is trying to ensure that new generations can find inspiration from what he considers to be revolutionaries of their time.
COOK: We use the story of 1811 to kind of revert back to the power of the people, being able to rise up and try and garner freedom through any means necessary.
ELLIOTT: Five years ago, Cook took part in a large-scale reenactment of the 1811 revolt.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Join us.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: Join us.
COOK: It was amazing to walk on the levees along the Mississippi River, 26 miles with machetes and muskets and other weapons, yelling, freedom or death, right? Join us. And on to New Orleans.
ELLIOTT: He recounts the brutal story of what happened to the 1811 rebels who were caught.
COOK: They were actually captured, tried, found guilty and beheaded. And their heads were placed on stakes and lined along the Mississippi River as a signal to other enslaved to not try to escape or to not try and fight.
ELLIOTT: Jo Banner of The Descendants Project says the collective trauma of that lingers today as descendants of the plantations struggle for the political voice to shape what happens in their communities.
JO BANNER: There are so many people who are just afraid to speak out or don't feel that maybe they have the right to push back against the system. Black people feel that we have to be sacrificed or we have to sacrifice something in order to gain something. So we're continually compromising with a system that we know is bad, but what can we do so that our heads aren't cut off? How do we survive?
ELLIOTT: This majority-Black region is in the heart of what's nicknamed Cancer Alley, the industry-laden stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where the EPA has found residents to be at high risk for exposure to hazardous pollution. Joy Banner says the new Woodland Museum will seek to connect the past to the present.
JOY BANNER: That throughline of the plantation extraction of Black health, of Black land and Black communities, till now we're seeing, you know, that same exploitation and extraction but from the industrial, petrochemical just encroachment of heavy industry in our communities.
ELLIOTT: Her sister Jo says there are many textures and layers to the story, just like the layers of paint that line the walls of the Woodland Plantation House.
Debbie Elliott, NPR News, LaPlace, La.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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