Listening to Black Louisiana history

A sound off via recent podcasts

Woman in Tignon (1844) by Adolph Rinck (Often mis-identifiedd as Marie Laveau: “The painting by Louis Nicholas Adolphe Rinck is part of the Hilliard’s William E. Groves Collection. When Groves originally bought the piece, scratches in the canvas distorted the subject’s eyes. The seller told him it was a portrait of Marie Laveau, so Groves had it restored in her likeness. In a dramatic plot twist, researchers later discovered the woman in the portrait was not Laveau, but rather a landowner from Algiers Point. She also happened to be blind.” The Current LA)

Nothing below is as fancy as Afro•Reads curriculum for David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return (check her out here), but it is prompted by a member of one of the labs I direct who requested more ways to learn about Black Louisiana history.

This research post is dedicated to Black New Orleans and Black Louisiana and the beautiful Black diaspora that Africans created despite and in the face of devastating and imaginative violence.

Listen and watch below.

• Yours truly on Ben Franklin’s World: Liz Covart, 308 Slavery and Freedom in French Louisiana, Ben Franklin’s World, January 29, 2025.

• John Bardes on Unsung History about the long reach of the prison industrial complex before the end of slavery and long after

• Liz Covart, 295 Whitney Plantation Museum, Ben Franklin’s World

• Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Episode 5: The Land of Our Fathers, Part 1,” Podcasts, The New York Times, October 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/podcasts/1619-slavery-sugar-farm-land.html. A link to the Spotify series is below.

• “More Than A Runaway: Maroons In Louisiana,” WWNO: TriPod, directed by Laine Kaplan-Levenson, December 10, 2015 with Dr. Sylviane Diouf https://www.wwno.org/podcast/tripod-new-orleans-at-300/2015-12-10/more-than-a-runaway-maroons-in-louisiana.

• Podcast Episode 41: Plot of Land - Ep. 8: 66 Acres Down by the River, Plot of Land, June 16, 2023 https://monumentlab.com/podcast/plot-of-land-ep-8-66-acres-down-by-the-river.

The next two podcasts are with descendants of enslaved people about their history and this history. These are precious to me, as someone invested in family history. These conversations are what Kitchen Table history is all about—grounding in the soul work and archive work that we (Black folks) use to find ourselves and each other. Grateful.

• Jenna Clifford, Education Across Generations, The Georgetown Slavery Archive, , https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/exhibits/show/podcasts/education.

“Maringouin, Louisiana is a small town of just 1,100 people, 900 of whom can trace their ancestry back to the Maryland Jesuits’ 1838 sale of 272 people. Many of those who were sold to Jesse Batey at the West Oak plantation have descendants who remain in Maringouin today. In this podcast, Georgetown American Studies major Jenna Clifford (GU ‘18) chats with descendant and leader of the GU272 Descendants Association, Sandra Green Thomas, about her family history and its relationship to the 1838 sale. Jenna also speaks with Georgetown Government professor, Doug Reed, about the relationship between the educational structures in Maringouin and disparate access to education across the country today.”

• A Chat with Descendant Community Member Dr. Brittany Cochran Jones, 2:2, Laura Plantation Podcast.

If you’ve got favorites, let me know. We can always add to this list.