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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Devil's Bargain: How the slave trade built New Orleans
This photo shows the old slave auction block where enslaved people were sold in the St. Louis Hotel at 621 St. Louis St. in the French Quarter. The block rested under recessed arches and between columns in the hotel's rotunda. (Credit: From the Historic New Orleans Collection; gift of Samuel Wilson Jr.) NEW ORLEANS – Stretching 3 miles from the Mississippi River to City Park, Esplanade Avenue is today a leafy thoroughfare lined with 19th-century mansions, restaurants, bars, and other businesses. In the evenings, tourists make their way across the avenue from the French Quarter, drinks in hand, ready to take in some jazz at the clubs on Frenchman Street. These visitors — or the current residents, for that matter — have little reason to give any thought to what once happened here in centuries past. The streetscape then could have included a cortege of enslaved Black people being forced-marched in chains from far away or from ships at the nearby docks or unloaded from wagons, all to be delivered to what amounted to urban prison camps. Before the Civil War, the blocks on and surrounding Esplanade Avenue were home to dozens of slave pens, stockyard-like enclosures of dirt lots surrounded by high brick walls to deter escape and shield public view. Inside were men, women, and children warehoused until they could be sold, either directly from the pens or on the auction blocks somewhere in the prosperous city of New Orleans. The pens were 'foul places, attractive to flies and lice and vermin, hazy with acrid smoke from cheap pork cooked over open flames, and reeking of sweat and urine and feces and garbage,' historian Joshua D. Rothman said in his book 'The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.' It was the stench and health concerns — not the inhumanity of the slave trade itself — that had prompted Quarter residents to push for the pens to be moved away from their fine homes into the neighborhoods along Esplanade. The prisoners, many torn from family and friends and forced to walk or endure ship passage for hundreds of miles from the Upper South to serve new masters, were crowded inside by overseers concerned only with keeping them healthy and fit enough to bring top dollar on the market. Passersby 'might hear the cries of small children' or 'the muted anguish of adults who are there, who are suffering what we call today PTSD or some sort of traumatic injury, who are trying to wrap their heads around what's happening,' Calvin Schermerhorn, history professor at Arizona State University said in an interview. An alert visitor can find a historical marker on the neutral ground near Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street, marking the city's connection to the brutal slave trade. Another marker across the intersection toward the river marks the location of the infamous slave pens where Solomon Northup, known for 'Twelve Years a Slave,' was sold into slavery. 'There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever,' Northup said in his 1853 memoir of his life as a free man sold into slavery. 'There will be reckoning yet … It may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just.' That accounting has yet to fully come to a city more associated with letting the good times roll than dealing with past sins. Outside of historians, academics and the generational memories of Black New Orleanians, relatively few people understand the enormity of New Orleans' involvement in the slave trade, which helped build generational wealth for white residents and made the city the most financially powerful and influential in the South. Gregg Kimball, Senior Consulting Historian for the Shockoe Institute in Richmond, Va., maintains that the slave trade was part of the 19th century U.S. economic boom 'that really made the United States a world power. It basically created American capitalism. That's a big deal. Right?'' For New Orleans, sugar and slaves were the driving forces for an economy that also thrived from the global cotton trade and its position at the mouth of the Mississippi River. 'It's those three intertwined. It's New Orleans's status as not only a port city, but as a place where banking is based and where trading happens in sugar and cotton and slaves,' New Orleans historian Erin Greenwald said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Slavery is in the very bones of New Orleans, where the essential protective levees, streets and core buildings were constructed by enslaved workers. Captive Black laborers helped grow and harvest the lucrative sugar and cotton crops, loaded the yield onto the ships for export and even served as collateral for plantation owners' bank loans to expand their land holdings and buy more enslaved workers. From the early 1800s until Union Troops occupied the city about a year after the beginning of the Civil War, New Orleans was known as the 'slave market of the South.' An estimated 135,000 people were bought and sold in the city and its immediate environs at more than 50 documented places. These are the same places where residents and tourists today celebrate Mardi Gras, sleep in luxury hotels, drink in dive bars, and eat at fine restaurants. In 2025, there is little public acknowledgement of the atrocities of slavery beyond a few mostly low-key historical markers and some local tours designed to go beyond the usual sightseeing fare. The history of how slavery made New Orleans the city it is today rarely intrudes on the daily awareness of most people. Greenwald said she values what she gets from reading academic histories. 'It's great. But that's not what's going to penetrate the consciousness,' she said. 'It's just not. It's expensive, it's jargony. … Historians are speaking generally to each other. You have to have a lot of prior knowledge to access a lot of the narrative in academic history.' There is also the city's reluctance to confront its painful past, focusing instead on tourism-friendly narratives and laissez les bons temps rouler marketing. 'There's a powerful impulse to keep slavery in the rearview mirror, to present a story about the United States that is one of progress and improvement,' Rothman, chair of the history department at the University of Alabama, said in an interview. 'People like to think slavery was terrible, but we fixed it. In fact, we've forgotten about it.' To those who know, the city's slave history is everywhere: former slave quarters operating as apartments and short-term rentals, historic structures built with slave labor and a culture of music and art that wouldn't exist without the influence and contributions of enslaved residents. But it isn't easy to track down the markers, read the academic research and all the other things that provide a thorough understanding of what happened. In an upcoming series of articles, Verite News hopes to make the city's connection to slavery better known and understood by residents who are not familiar with stories and connections held dear by descendants of the enslaved and to the millions who come to visit 'the city that care forgot.' The historical marker for the St. Louis Hotel, the most famous slave auction site in New Orleans, is placed at the back of the luxurious Omni Royal Orleans hotel, next to a loading dock. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people walk past it each day without pausing to read about what took place there. The marker itself seems to downplay the connection to the slave market and its inhumanity. 'The luxurious St. Louis Hotel included a bank, ballroom, shopping arcade, and trading exchange,' the marker boasts. 'Six days a week, under the hotel's domed rotunda, auctioneers sold land and goods,' before what almost seems like an aside of 'as well as thousands of enslaved people.' Slavery-related markers on The Moonwalk by the Mississippi River, The Merieult House on Royal Street, The Cabildo in Jackson Square, slave pen locations at Esplanade and Chartres, the New Orleans Slave Depot at Common and Baronne streets, and Congo Square are also easy to overlook. And even for those who do stop and read, the official city guidance and literature provides little context for what it means and what the reader should think or do about it. While other cities around the world have benefited from building museums, permanent exhibits, and other educational structures on painful events, including the Holocaust, race massacres, and the atrocities and injustices of the Jim Crow era, New Orleans has mostly remained on the sidelines. The removal of Confederate monuments from prominent positions in the city sparked a great outcry in 2017 from those who said they saw it as 'erasing history,' but the recognition of enslaved people's contributions to building and molding New Orleans has not received similar support. 'There had been this resistance, I think, in New Orleans generally to recognizing darker sides of history that complicate the fun-time celebration, exotic nature tourism of the city,' said Greenwald, who put together 'Purchased Lives,' an extensive exhibit on slavery that was on display at The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2015. 'New Orleans is not alone in that, but they might be one of the worst examples of covering up things that aren't part of their tourism narrative, and that has changed.' Many of the slave markers were placed by a city commission appointed to mark the New Orleans Tricentennial in 2018. Freddi Evans, a New Orleans author and educator who was on the commission, said in an interview that the markers have had a positive effect. 'Well, I don't know if it has an impact on the people who are coming here as tourists, but it has an impact on the people who are here, the citizens,' she said, including the descendants of enslaved people who have taken it upon themselves to keep their history from being erased. The New Orleans Tricentennial Commission does offer a slave marker tour app that provides 'an immersive and dramatic self-guided tour of sites that played an important role in the domestic slave trade of New Orleans.' Each year, over the July 4th weekend, the New Orleans MAAFA Commemoration takes place. Sponsored by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, participants wearing white begin at Congo Square with stops at the Esplanade site, the Tomb of the Unknown Slave (next to Catholic Church on Governor Nicholls Street), and other locations. Maafa is a Kiswahili word that means 'great disaster' or 'great tragedy.' 'Hundreds of people come,' Evans said. It's one way the city can memorialize those who suffered under slavery. Harvard historian Walter Johnson has written that the whole city should be considered a memorial to slavery. 'The levee is a slave-built levee. The entire economic development of the city was premised upon slavery. All the buildings were built by enslaved people or free people of color,' Johnson told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017. 'You could memorialize the city of New Orleans with a million markers of which enslaved people lived there, which enslaved people worked there, which enslaved people built this.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
I'm One of the Filmmakers DOGE Targeted at the NEH. Here's Why We're In Trouble (Guest Column)
I just became a member of a group I never wanted to join — filmmakers whose National Endowment for the Humanities grants were terminated. As you may have heard, President Donald Trump and DOGE recently cut the vast majority of staff and grants at the NEH. It's hit documentary filmmakers hard. More from The Hollywood Reporter Trump Names Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro Acting U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. President Biden Continues to Say He Would've Beaten Trump, Says He Wasn't Surprised by 2024 Election Outcome: "They Went the Sexist Route" Studio Chiefs Agree: California Needs a Better Plan to Keep Hollywood With the NEH cuts, DOGE has targeted 89 documentary and related 'media' projects (this includes podcasts). Among them are a four-part Ken Burns docuseries exploring the history of our criminal justice system; Rita Coburn's film on W.E.B. Du Bois; and Matia Karrell and Hilary Prentice's documentary Coming Home: Fight for a Legacy, about America's overlooked female World War II aviators. Even documentaries on baseball and Nancy Drew saw their funding stopped. The future of some of these projects is now uncertain. In many cases the films were stopped midstream — Karrell and Prentice were able to get 20 percent of their funds, for instance, but the remaining $480,000 are currently inaccessible. This sum — earned after a decade of research, filming and personal investment — is everything to the filmmakers, even as it's peanuts to the federal government. Between $10 million and $20 million in 'media funding' were cut. That may sound hefty, but it's only about 10 percent of the NEH's overall budget (many other grantees of course saw cuts too), which is 0.003 percent of the total federal budget. Hardly a deficit buster. The mass termination of NEH awards is unprecedented in the agency's 60-year history, and doesn't just affect filmmakers. It also impacts the cultural lifeblood of our country. The NEH was established in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and in the years since has awarded $6 billion in grants to humanities councils in 56 states and jurisdictions in support of projects that deepen understanding of our shared humanity. Many NEH-funded films have had major social impact, from Gordon Parks' 1984 made-for-public television film Solomon Northup's Odyssey, based on the Twelve Years a Slave author's odyssey to A Midwife's Tale, a docudrama based on the diary of an early American midwife that aired on PBS's American Experience in 1997. Or 2020's Crip Camp, an empowering look at the disability rights movement by James Lebrecht, one of its activists and founders. All that is now imperiled. My own letter was a gut punch. I'd been working on a documentary, My Underground Mother, for over a decade. The film traces my search for my late mother's hidden Holocaust past, which included time at a Jewish women's forced labor camp that she and 60 other inmates wrote about in a secret diary (a band of resisters who I locate around the world in real time, combining written passages with new interviews). Their story highlights an untold aspect of the Holocaust and the evil consequences of antisemitism. But the nonprofit sponsoring my work (all NEH films have one) received a letter last month from Michael McDonald, the NEH's acting chair, that stated my documentary 'no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement,' based on a rarely used clause that gives federal agencies broad authority to stop funding projects that don't adhere to an administration's agenda. 'Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities,' it read. Apparently my small independent film wasn't only deemed a waste of taxpayers' money by this administration — its very funding was imperiling the 'urgent' fiscal needs of our nation. All of this seemed especially peculiar given how President Trump is currently at war with major universities for their alleged failures to combat antisemitism. The irony wasn't lost on Sen. Elizabeth Warren either — she singled out My Underground Mother as an especially egregious example of a bad cut decision. President Trump also stated that many of the terminated projects focused on DEI, but it's hard to see how that applies to movies about the likes of artist Frida Kahlo or Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. As the Academy Award-nominated director Immy Humes — a grantee who has been working on a film about the little-known indie-cinema figure Shirley Clarke and who has organized a group of filmmakers to fight the moves – notes, 'The cuts are too sweeping and undefined.' She adds, 'I was on cloud nine when I was notified about my NEH grant award. And then boom. This crazy termination with no warning.' While DOGE's Elon Musk has characterized federal grants as handouts and grant recipients as freeloaders scamming the federal government, let me be the first to tell you, the NEH grant process isn't for those looking for easy payouts. Statistically, it's harder to win an NEH grant than to gain admission to Harvard, and it's often preceded by rejections. My first award, a film development grant of $75,000, was the culmination of nearly a decade of research, writing, filming, pitching and fundraising. The vetting process here was nearly as thorough. One insider said that the only DOGE people who visited were two young men who only spent a few days at the office. Needless to say, the impact of these cuts will be huge and resonate far beyond the documentary world. Defunding these grants means harming every library, historical society, museum and organization that produces, distributes and plays these films. This pipeline is further damaged by Trump's proposed gutting of the NEA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's hard to know what the next steps could or should be. Instead of issuing clear guidelines on how to appeal, the administration issued a series of confusing directives, extending the 30-day appeal window by another 30 days but also stating: 'NEH is not offering a means of dispute resolution.' It's up to the nonprofit organizations the NEH works with, not individual filmmakers, to seek legal redress for the grant terminations. But this makes for a scattershot approach, with many choosing to accept termination out of fear of losing overdue reimbursements. Others, like Prentice, whose production partner Women Make Movies is filing an appeal on behalf of her film, have decided to push back. Some recent wins in court, most notably by journalists from the Voice of America, do give hope. (Though an appeals court just reversed the ruling.) V.O.A. was founded during World War II to broadcast fact-based journalism to troops and citizens abroad and counter Nazi propaganda. And if there's one thing I've learned from my film's deep dive into history, it's that there's no better way to counter hate than by humanizing the other. I've seen first hand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs. But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate's rising ride. 'The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,' wrote George Orwell. As we celebrate the Allies win over hatred with the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day on Thursday, we can hope, pray — and fight — to ensure that organizations like the NEH are here to stop that destruction. Marisa Fox is a veteran journalist and television producer and the director of 'My Underground Mother.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Highest-Profile Harris Endorsements: Taylor Swift, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen and More
